HI all,
I want to invest on a PC I can experiment with so I can try/test putting up all kinds of servers - web, sql, mail, etc. What is a good set up for a pc such as this in terms of memory, hard drive, etc? Any special consideration?

Right now, I have a laptop I can use for my current personal needs so the new pc will be devoted entirely to this new endeavor.

Thanks for any input guys.
Yanie

usually the cheapest windoze pc on the market will be WAY more than the required minimums for a decent linux distro to run happily...

take debian, for example:

http://www.debian.org/releases/stabl...en.html#s-mmhr

If your going to use Linux, well, just about anything will work.

I currently have a server setup that is a p200 with 128 megs of RAM, a dying hard drive and I am currently using it with apache, ssh, ftp, samba and nfs.

wow... and i thought i have to buy the latest & greatest ... thanks a lot for your inputs!

Nope, not with Linux. For the longest time I had my p166 with 64megs of RAM setup to be the house mp3 server where we'd stream our music using either NFS or Samba on it.

Cheers.

Running Apache, PHP, and MySQL on a P233 with 128M RAM and 2.1G HDD. Runs flawless. No X Windows installed as it is just a personal web/email server. Currently running Redhat 9. Decent $40 (yard sale) server for experimentation use.

The only concern with old PCs is hard disk space, I find most distros take up allot of disk space compared to windows. (ex: win98 takes 300MB - most distros are 1GB+ I did say most, as there's some that are small such as floppy ones) What's madning about old computers is bios limitations. You can't put a 120Gig hard drive in a 486... well you can, but you'll be lucky if you see 10 gigs of it.

I also forgot to mention, the biggest issue with old computers as server is cooling. I ran a server on a pentium once, had my whole site on there, and it melted down on me. Old computers have less fans because they are less likly to get that hot, but when on for long, they can still get pretty hot.

My p200 running as a server now I got a minimal Slack install to be less or around 600 megs to start off with..

If you go with an older distro, I use to get Redhat 6.2 down to about 400 megs total size..

And as far as cooling goes, just install in an updated case and you can always add fans.

How did you get slackware to do a minimal? I wanted to do that on my 486 but the only option was to go "newbie" and say no to all packages, but I have to sleep 8 hours once every 24 hours so I don't have the time to press "no" until it's done. I started it yesterday but relized I'd be there forever. Right now I'm installing slackware on my 486 (full) and it's been running for 11 hours, and now it's starting to crap out with corrupted packages...

Custom or Expert mode. It will display a list of all the packages in each package series, you check which one's you want and don't want. With 9.1 it will prompt for each package series before continuing to install the packages, etc.

The minimal install I did was with 8.0 I think though.. haven't tried with 9.0 but you can eliminate a bunch of packages though to make it a very slim install.

Is there a way to know which ones are needed for the system to actually work, or can I uncheck all of them with no problems?

Now the stupid second floppy does not want to boot anymore though, so I'm probably going to end up trashing this whole idea. Linux is not for me, everytime I try it I get problems. I need a real computer, so I can just boot off the CD, it would save many headaches, not to meantion a faster install with less chance of errors. But I'm a student and don't have a grand to ditch out to build another computer.