i currently use a lovely old dell Pentium 1
as an internet gateway/firewall plus file server.

great little machine is headless and practically noiseless;
rarely ever crashed on it's own (ive crashed it many times -
it's my 1st venture into linux) - longest uptime has been 57 days.

... I once (as root) did a "cat big-giant-binary-file > /dev/hdb" and
wiped out my /var partition - and recovered it without backups!!

.... (what am i talking about?)

...anyway im now running a slim custom 2.4 kernel (Sarge) and wonder if any
windows managers (icewm?) will run on it if i should put a head on it. Would
greatly help with firewall admin! Trouble is it is only 32mb ram and of course the processor is perhaps anemic for X.

Im sure some of you have killer little utility servers on older h/w (isn't it great?)

Do any of you know of any solutions?

Fluxbox is even smaller then IceWM. My wife used that on a Pentium 1 laptop with 32 MB ram and it ran fine, compared to using Gnome.

why not use webmin, which you could log into from another computer without needing X on the server?

otherwise, i agree, fluxbox.

uteck - thanks , i may try that!

synaptical,

doesn't webmin require apache webserver? (i really dont know)

if so, then i'll not use it, im trying to limit the services on this particular box.

if not, then im interested in what webmin can do and will look into it.

perhaps it is moot, as apache would be less resource intensive than ANY win/mgr..?

anyway thank you both for the replies.!
danimal

nope, apache not needed.

---Just give blackbox a try, if you want. I use it in a P200 MMX really smoothly....

So I suppose that on a P100 runs ok.

Just an idea....