My buddy needed a computer, but wanted something relatively inexpensive, so I found a used P-III 450 system at the local used computer shop (liquidates used business boxes) for $100 USD. Not a bad deal, and turns out it runs Redhat 9 like a charm (can’t wait to see what it does with Fedora & Kernel 2.6x). Incidentally, my buddy seems to really like Linux so far. I was wondering how intuitive he’d find it, but having little prior experience in Windows, he may be having an easier time of it.

On to my question. While looking for an appropriate used box, I ran into several ultra-cheep (like $50 USD or less) P-II boxes. Will these make functional Linux machines? Is this equipment more or less perfectly good but the victim of MS-Bloat? Would they make perfectly good boxes for surfing he web & doing some word processing, etc...

They will if the side bus is reasonable and if they have enough RAM. RH 9 for example should have 128 megs **sorry about the double post - no idea how it happened, during a really weird glitch in spell check

I'm running Libranet on a PII 366 Laptop and it runs quick so I'd have to say it should run great.

Keep in mind that there are faster running distros than Mandrake, Red Hat, Fedora, and the like.

Some specifically tailored for use on slower / older machines with less capacity to run the fancy stuff.

Slackware is a very customizable distro.
Vector Linux is based on Slackware, made for older hardware and still very functional.
Damn Small Linux is made for even older hardware, and uses very very light apps in all places.
Too light for me Vector is good, Slack is great for these sorts of applications.

--Shade

I've run slackware on some pretty old stuff, including a Pentium 133 laptop w/ 64 MB RAM. You can scale the kernel down to practically nothing (the stock Slackware kernel comes with some stuff compiled in that can be done away with, and if you're low on HD space you can do away with most of the modules) and a basic install with X, fluxbox, and your basic apps will only run you about 700 MB, maybe less.

slight

I've Libranet 2.7 Classic Free in a Compaq Armada 166 MHZ and 32 of RAM. Runs just fine with Blackbox or XFCE-classic. Some applications as Firefox takes a while to open, due the low end machine, but it's quite acceptable. Overall, it runs as fast as Win98 (that machine came with Win95 installed). I've also had Slack 8.1 and 9.0 in that machine. Just as great .

Regards!

Damn, you got me beat...

Pentium 1, 200mhz here. I only have 64MB Ram in that baby, I don't know if the BIOS would let me have more(Possibly 128?), but I think that 64 is the max, and it definately is for my pocketbook with that computer. I think I've just successfully convinced my dad into letting me put Linux on a 1.7ghz, though, so it'll make me very happy if that works out. I need to find some answers for my situation though.

To answer your question:

As long as the computer uses a light-weight WM or DM(XFCE4 is the only DM I would use for a PII), and you stay away from OpenOffice, and use FireFox, you shouldn't really have any problems.

Hey I'm runnin libranet on P166MHz with 64MB Ram and 512KB video card. It runs fine.

witehat I dont know what a side bus is... if your talking about a front side bus, then it is entirely dependent on the processor (and a little on the mobo) and will be within the range of what the manufacturers did to enhance performance along the way (uhh having trouble phrasing that just got back from hawaii havent slept in two days) but an example would be for a p4 400-533mhz in which case people will generally just consider the overall processor performance and think of the fsb as a package deal.

It's also really not a big deal for the web and wordprocessing and such you dont need 128 mb ram I have 256 on my laptop and 512 on my desktop I rarely use more than about 50 mb when im just surfing and writing on an older machine use slackware or something else reasonably slimmed down i personally say stay away from anything less than p2 and 64 mb ram + 8 mb video card but thats just personal preference and reduces headaches I still use 75 mhz machines (though loaded with ram 32mb!!!) for stuff sometimes and they do run X but not very quickly, also when your in that area your expensive part is your monitor keyboard and mouse upgrading the computer itself is not likely to cost you much more especially since ive seen athlon-xp 1900+ computers with cd-rw and 40 gig hdds for $300 albeit just the computer itself no extras for a main computer I would think thats not a bad deal and not that hard to swing my newest computer (computer only) was $700 and thats an athlon-xp 2800+ 512 mb ram geforceFX 5700 Ultra and dual 80 gig SATA drives, if your a good shopper you can get good deals

btw I first thought this thread was about underclocking by the title

im using a old pentium 133 as my web and fileserver

pentium 133mhz
32meg ram
maxtor ata133 pci controller
maxtor 13gig ata66 (onboard ata controller, for the os)
maxtor 120gig ata133 (pci controller)
netgear fa310tx

its running a full compile of gentoo (took 8 days to compile)
and it will quite happily pump about 5meg / sec via samba

and though mass tweaking of the kernel (wolk 2.4.20) it doesnt invade swap space even on only 32meg ram!

http://cyberfish.org/projects/cfserver
^---- the server in question!

Realistically, you can build a server with LFS in about 8-10 megas HD in a 386 PC...

true, but I wouldn't recommend actually build it on the 386... it took me 10 hours to compile glibc on the following specs:
- PII Mobile 333Mhz
- 64 Mb RAM
- 128 Mb swap
- 5400 rpm laptop hard disk

so... I would recommend crosscompile it from a faster pc BTW, I have an old 386, I'm planning an LFS system for it, so that will become my slowest computer running Linux. Currently the slowest is my PI 486 66Mhz, 32 Mb ram, some swap space. It has IPCop distro installed and will function as internet server as soon as the ADSL package has arrived

greetz,
.-=~ iluvatar ~=-.