I have a Compaq Presario 5050 that I want to use as a moniterless backup server... ofcourse i have added drives... what distro would you guys recommend for this low of hardware... that will run clean and effiecient... also something easy to install is always nice.... but i'll sacrifice for a secure clean running box with no X.

Britten

oh here are the specs:

Processor Intel Celeron processor - 333 MHz
Memory 96 MB SyncDRAM, upgradable to 256 MB (SyncDRAM DIMM required)
Hard drive 8.0 GB hard drive
CD-ROM drive 32X Max CD-ROM drive
Modem 56K ITU V.90 modem
Cache 128 full-speed L2 Pipeline Burst Cache

Graphics 2X AGP (133 MHz Accelerated Graphics Port)
ATI 3D Rage LT Pro TM (64-bit Hardware Accelerated 3D Graphics)
2 MB 100 MHz SyncGraphics video memory (upgradable to 4 MB)
MPEG full-motion video playback
Maximum non-interlaced resolution of up to 1280 x 1024 (when supported by monitor)

Expansion slots One open PCI expansion slot
One modem installed PCI/ISA combo slot
One open ISA slot



Let me know what you think.

Britten

I thought you said you added drives?? *shrug* anyways..

You can run pretty much anything you want on there.. just don't run or install X, as you said..

FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Slackware, Debian, and even something like Ubuntu would work well (just use the boot option to install as a server)

ubuntu? what is that? and what are the advantages?

yeah i just pasted the specs from the compaq site... i did add drives... lol

so like fedora or whatever? i mean i want something that is easy to keep uptodate as well

if you care about updates then go with a flavour that has a subscribsion method attached to it. that way you keep getting the latest updates.

personally i have suse and i am happy with it. but i use the graphic admin panel too often so i dunno if it would work for you or not.

Ubuntu is 100% free but it has commercial support available.. it always has goodf security updates.. and is based off of the Debian 'unstable' release...

It generally works quite well... I personally don't like Fedora.. it is WAY to buggy for me.. lots and lots of things just don't work... but it's also not intended for production systems.. it meant to be a developers tool with the most bleeding edge features as a testing platform for technologies that may eventually work their way into the RHEL releases.

I don't this is entirely accurate. Its not meant for developers only although you are right that some of the technologies are for use in RHEL.

humm, i to like Suse but it is not exactly minimal... (5 cds to install). Ubuntu would be my recomendation, its easy to install and it has a server setting. If not maybe Debian? it installs a base system then lets you add what you need. You could always try Gentoo if your up to it, takes a while to install thought

With that amount of RAMm I would not install X, I think of Gentoo/Slackware or even LFS.
The only graphical distro you can try is DamnSmallLinux.
If you wanna run a server on it you can try CentOS or Debian stable which are pretty good for servers.