This PIII I have is a socket 370 933MHz version. It came out of a server along with another identical PIII, so I have a backup just in case I fry it :P

The reason I'm burning disks is partly because I like having physical media, but also because it is faster to install if you need to install on many different computers as I often have to do, I go through computers like candy. There is spotty network support on some of these computers, and no network support on others (I get a lot of laptops with broken WiFi and no ethernet) so having dedicated physical media in these cases is preferable. The reason I'm using optical media instead of USB thumb drives is because that gives me the most compatibility across a wide variety of computers. I can use a USB external DVD drive to read a CD/DVD in almost any computer, but I cannot say the same about booting from USB.

I appreciate the suggestion though! I do have some thumb drives that I use when I know the computers can boot from USB, but if I have any doubt at all, I just default to my CD/DVD installations, just so I don't have to waste my time troubleshooting.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hey! I have a dual Xeon 750MHz (upgraded to 2GB RAM) Compaq workstation -- too good to throw away; besides, it used to be Jerry Pournelle's "Regina" so a bit of historical value. -- Now I'm wondering what older distros would actually use that dual CPU. Right now it runs Win2K (takes a long time to boot, but runs like the wind once it's up) but has no job... I'd actually never thought to try linux on it. (It'll do USB boot, but so slow it looks hung. Probably USB 1.x)

Mine uses RAMBUS, and that used to be hideously expensive, but now ... I think it cost me $15 for 2GB of Elpida brand (4 sticks). Tests about 5% slower than Samsung, but runs a good 30F degrees cooler, which is a pretty fair tradeoff. Should probably max it out, just on General Principles.

Hey nice!! It's pure coincidence, but the workstation I'm building/upgrading is a dual PIII 866MHz Dell Precision 220! It also uses RAMBUS, but I only had enough to get it up to 1 GB. I'm using another of my PCI SATA cards to let me use an SSD (these things are super handy to have around since they work with any OS Win 95 and up!)

1 members found this post helpful.

That's pretty nice (and probably doesn't weigh as much.. the Compaq is 57 pounds). What are you doing with it?

Lately saw an adapter for an m.2 drive... will have to look that up again, don't recall what interface. However -- you can get an IDE to SD card adapter, works great, and is bootable, cheap way to roll your own.

Not sure yet... it originally had Windows NT 4.0 on it, considered doing something with that since NT supports multi-processor machines, it has the original code on the case. Might also try one of the distros that you linked earlier, see if I can get youtube to run

I don't think I've ever even seen NT4 in the flesh, tho I've encountered it plenty on back-when webservers. Was one I had to use regularly that would get clogged up and slow to a crawl... figured out how to lock it up entirely so someone would reset it next morning. (Otherwise it would stay clogged for days or weeks.)

Haven't had time to mess with it, but lately I inherited a not-so-old PowerEdge R510 (dual Xeon 2.5GHz, 64GB RAM, bunch of HDs... still weighs less than the Compaq!) and it came naked, so have been wondering what to put on it, not to mention what job to give it. Is there an 'easy' server linux? with a nice GUI for the terminal-impaired...

I've got Netware6 around here somewhere... actually I might have 6.5, which I vaguely recall was a larval form of SuSE.

Good heavens, support pages are still up.
https://support.novell.com/techcente...c2003_04d.html
(And my Novell login, not used for 15 years, still works!)

I'd suggest Centos 7, that is what I run on ALL of my servers! It uses YUM (as opposed to apt-get) so if you are used to apt-get it might take some getting used to, but it has a very clean GUI and runs pretty lean. Then again, I usually forgo the GUI and just install the minimal text-only shell, to make it even leaner :P

I'm not very familiar with Debian based servers I'm afraid, I found CentOS and I liked it, so I stuck with it!

1 members found this post helpful.

I've never gotten CentOS to run. I'm only familiar with Synaptic so everything else is an Adventure.

<goes off, looks at site>

They say it comes in KDE (I can't stand Gnome, I'd rather use Win10 and that's downstream from "stick forks in my eyes") but I haven't encountered that ISO yet... anyway I'll look further, costs nothing to try it!

ETA: somehow I managed to initially pick mirrors that didn't have the KDE edition, but finally found one!

I have a suggestion, on how to boot from USB flash drives, on very old computers. Most of my computers are old, and don't boot from USB, only from CD/DVD drives. On those old computers, I use Plop Boot Manager. From their website,

"The Plop Boot Manager is a small program to boot different operating systems. The boot manager has a built-in ide cdrom and usb driver to access that hardware without the help/need of a bios. You can boot the operating systems from hard disk, floppy, CD/DVD or from USB. You can start the boot manager from floppy, CD, network and there are many more ways to start the boot manager. You can install the boot manager on your hard disk. There is no extra partition required for the boot manager."


I have Plop Boot Manager on a CD-R I had burned. My copy is from 2011, when I burned my CD-R. There are newer versions available at their website. It works fine on all of my older computers, to use my bootable flash drives. On those super old computers, you first boot with the CD, (or floppy, zip, LS120, etc) and when it finds the USB flash drive, it passes control to whatever operating system is on the USB.

This way, you don't need to burn a hundred different CD's or DVD's, to test different Linux distributions. Just use a few usb flash drives, along with a single CD-R.

Although I do create plenty of CD's or DVD's, mostly from habit (before I found Plop, Easy2Boot, Unetbootin, etc).

It works fine for me, on the hardware I have tested it with.




https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

1 members found this post helpful.

I've gotten a few more tests done, but I have also just gotten in a new 120 gig SSD for the machine, so I will be hopefully able to do tests faster now.

I just learned that none of the distros I have tried truly "support" any of my graphics card options, and any "support" is really just basic SVGA pass through, no hardware acceleration. This is the biggest issue with the distros I have tried, and explains why some things are snappy while others (graphical elements usually) feel sluggish or are flat out broken.

You mean the GeForce FX 5700 ??

That seems strange. I have an FX5200 that used to be in my back-when P3 linux test box, and it worked with at least some distros. (Even tho the card is missing one capacitor.)

One problem you run into with older vidcards is a lot of them are VESA 1.2, which is generally not supported by linux even back in the mists of distro history (Mandrake did but not much else); you need VESA 2.0 support. There was a DOS util to test vidcards for VESA version, but offhand I can't find it.

For that era I like a Matrox G200, either PCI or AGP. (Apparently so did Dell; it's the video chip in the R510 -- and that chip is now about 20 years old!) 8MB cards are common; 16MB exist but are harder to come by. Newer isn't always better; IIRC the Matrox G200 has VESA 2.0 support, but the Matrox G400/450 does not.

Might as well add this here: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...rs-4175449680/

In my use case. If a dumpster computer can't boot a WOMP CD, It becomes screw and spare hardware scrap metal.

I had not noticed WOMP -- looks like it can run on almost anything!

Hardware has become so disposable that there are always surplus PCs... at least in some parts of the world. In others, not so much. I have a friend in South Africa who can't upgrade her work PC's memory because the import duties on RAM are now so high, and discards to rifle for parts are almost nonexistent.

As shipped the G400/G450 may not have, but BIOS upgrades were (are?) available to cure that, maybe even to 2.1 or 3.0. I upgraded multiple G400s to 2.1, but that was at least a decade ago. Last I looked, Matrox seemed to have removed them from its website.

1 members found this post helpful.