What distro. should I use?

justin.tyler · 03-27-2006, 05:38 PM

Sorry to post this, as I'm sure it's been covered, but the search feature seems to be not working. Anyway, I've just acquired an old 450 MHz Pentium III PC with 256MB of ram and a 12 gig hard drive. I'd like to use it as a web server, but am unsure what distro. to use. I'm fairly new to GNU/Linux, so I'd like to keep it fairly simple to get Apache, PHP, MySQL, and an FTP server of some sort on there.

What do you guys think?

pljvaldez · 03-27-2006, 05:42 PM

Anything should run fine, although you'll probably want to forget about using a heavy gui like Gnome or KDE. I always recommend Debian. Or it looks like you're using Kubuntu. You could just do a server install of it...

On an old machine, you may get some mileage out of recompiling your kernel to increase performance.

If you decide on Debian, I recommend checking out http://www.aboutdebian.com/

ckoniecny · 03-27-2006, 08:43 PM

Run Slackware w/ WindowMaker as your Window Manager.

tamoneya · 03-27-2006, 09:32 PM

i would use vector linux. It is designed for slower processors and is very compacted and efficient. Can even be run off of a liveCD if you wish. That might be a good choice if you just want to try linux. Can be found at distrowatch

Wim Sturkenboom · 03-28-2006, 12:41 AM

I have Slackware 10.1 running on 2 similar boxes (K6-III/450 and P3/500, each with 128MB). It run's Gnome quite smoothly (Just takes a bit of time to load) although my default WM is windowmaker.

hob · 03-28-2006, 03:32 PM

I'd agree with pljvaldez - anything is fine, you just need to avoid running the standard GUI (GNOME and KDE) as they eat memory. Debian or CentOS are sensible and popular distros for servers. Webmin and PHPMyAdmin would provide Web-based admin interfaces that don't use much resources. Obviously, secure those with SSL and good passwords.

binarybob0001 · 03-28-2006, 04:45 PM

This should be in the distributions forum.