hey guys, someone is going to give me some old Pentium 1 133's. Are these worth dealing with as far as linux, and if so, which distro would you suggest. Ive been also thinking about getting a dual P1 mobo if they are around and sticking two of the processors on it, not sure if that is worth the effort either. Thx for your help.

Hmm, I don't think there were any dual P1 mobos. I'm almost certain the first Pentium capable of SMP was the PPro. The 133's could do all sorts of things. Heck, I run a webserver/mail-server/NAT machine off of a 486.

Any distro will do, you just have to be really careful about installing the absolute minimal ammount of stuff. This will of course lead to you not installing something that soon turns out to be necessary and in the newbe stages re-installing is always easier than adding goop on, blah blah blah, its going to be fun.

Offhand, Any modern distro will run on that machine, although RH and Mandy might complain if you've got less than 32Mb of RAM. My call: Slackware, but that's 100% pure bias.

Cheers,

Finegan

Actually, old machines like that have some pretty good usefulness with linux. For instance, you can setup one as a firewall, or a router, or for internet connection sharing. Obviously you won't be able to use it for heavy duty work.

The hard part will be finding the right distro to run. Most of the recent releases are designed to run on P3 or better systems, even though they still support the old hardware. Of course you can always customize the install and just put the minimum required files on it to have it run the OS, then add whatever you need as you go. Maybe the best approach is to try something like Mandrake or Redhat and see how viable it is on that machine.

alright, cool. Im an extreme newbie here, and im probably going to go with Mandrake or Red Hat. I had a friend that installed Slack 8 on my main P3 system once, that thing frustrated me to death But thats good to hear that it will run on a p1 system. How do you think something like that would perform as an ftp server? is the internal bus speed too slow?

Oh man, unless you have a T-1 or an OC-3 or somesuch running into the back of that thing the limitation is solidly and easily going to be the bandwidth. The system bus will probably be 33mhz, mountains faster than if you have it on a 100Mbit network.

Cheers,

Finegan

lol, im not refering to like a large server, im talking more in the lines of something for me to keep my stuff on and me and my friends can access it. But thats cool. now i have found my use for it, hah. I dont think ill need any GUI, i think if anything WM would be the only thing that i could run.

You could probably network the systems together and setup one as the master FTP server with the others mapped via SAMBA.

You should have plenty of system there to do what you are talking about.

ok, thx guys for your help, hopefully ill get the systems this weekend, so ill try to give it a go then.

thx

yes theres dual pentium 133's and such, look on ebay, i have seen quad pentium 90's on there lol