Yea, I guess there was no discussion about how he was to get all this stuff. If you don't have high speed internet access (or can borrow it from somewhere) then you might want to resort one of those many companies that will send you cheap CD's of various Linux distros for a dollar or two each. It is just that your choices might be limited to "mainstream" distributions, which of course Slackware is one.



If you are stuck with downloading Linux from a slow dial-up, then try these small sized distro's like:

DSL - if you can figure out how to install it to a hard drive

Feather - Same problem as DSL

old Vector - too bad Vector and Peanut got about as big as the full Slackware they are based on,
I don't think there is much point in them anymore.

PuppyLinux - Will install to hard drive, but then you need to use "option 2"

DeLi - Look promising actually (http://delilinux.berlios.de)

Cobind - Designed for old systems, but might still be a rather big download.

Zipslack - Will install to Hard drive but does NOT include any sort of GUI

There seems to be lots of banter recommending Debian and then talking about how the install is difficult.

There also seems to be a consensus that you can't use Knoppix on a small memory system.

I DISAGREE with this consensus, and I have data, quoted directly from the book "Knoppix Hacks" which I previously recommended.

The reason Knoppix wants memory is because it installs itself onto a RAM Disk to maintain its "Zero footprint" on the hard drive. However, if you
HAVE a hard drive, and these old systems do, then Knoppix can use swap space on the HDD instead of a RAM disk. (Yes slow ... but not that
slow ... ALL Linux runs slower on low memory systems, but it runs
stably too).

The "knoppix-installer" comes with knoppix, and it painlessly installs Knoppix on the HDD. You want to use cfdisk to make yourself at least a 128 MByte swap partition (512 would be better if there's enough HDD space.). Once Knoppix knows about your hard-drive, the installer allows
you to make a minimal Debian system. It is being recommend that
Knoppix be used as a way to install Debian because of its superior
hardware detection. To read about the knoppix-installer, do a Google
Search on "hack #32 Knoppix Hacks" (I'm feeling Lucky will take you
right there ... It's an O'Reilly book and they'll let you download
particular hacks for free.)

3com 509 PCI cards can be picked up for a song... the only OS I've found that doesn't like them is the custom version of OS/2 Warp 5 called eCs

Certainly linux flavours, win 3.1, and QNX all love that card. No problems with detection.

There are usually two or 3 PCI slots on pentiums - at least all the ones I have owned.

ISA slot NICs are generally NOT 10-100 compatible with fast ethernet. If you use just a dumb hub, you will slow down all machines connections on the LAN if you don't use a fast ethernet card.

wartstew you could do worse than applying the 98lite concept to that machine that ran faster on 95 (most machines do). Go to litepc.com - I used his concept about 5 or 6 years ago on a p266mmx and it worked really well.

http://www.litepc.com/

Dude, be a man. Grow some short and curlies and say ta hell with the precompiled crap. Slap Gentoo on that baby. I had a p133 with 16mb sdram runnin gentoo. It was great. One tip though. Go with Gentoo 1.2 as it'll use gcc-2.95.3. Everyhting compiles faster with it. Not as many optimization optins, but it works great. Oh yeah, to install Gentoo, you might wanna try this little trick though. Install a minimal debian first to the partiton your gonna use for swap in gentoo. Once u got debian running, just install gentoo as you would normally with the install doc. The only reason i suggest this is because gentoo's ramdisk on the cd ain't gonna fit in 16mb of ram, but u can install debian from floppy and the internet if you have the old box connected to a lan thats connected to the net. As for surfing the web and stuff like that, Xorg, Fluxbox, FireFox, and mpg321. G'luck, and have fun.

If he can install Debian he is much better off keeping it.
Compiling with a Pentium 133 and 16 Meg RAM? He can compile for the rest of this century

Just a few quick comments:

1) I would expect that even a stripped down Knoppix install would still be quite bloated as compared to the other options discussed here, but I admit that I've never tried it, and do realize that DSL was originally based on Knoppix too.

2) I doubt the the network card choice is of any great concern when dealing with Linux. I've gotten all sorts of strange generic stuff to work. ISA cards are slightly more troublesome however. I've never seen a 100BaseT ISA card, was the speed too fast for the bus?

3) Thanks for the tip about 98lite. I did know about it years ago and considered it for that machine, but it went to the computer-illiterate parents 1000 miles away and I chose to keep it as stock as possible, especially since I had no prior experience with 98lite. A new computer is in their near future anyway.

4) I guess I need to try Gentoo someday. I think Gent00_OwnZ was suggesting cross compiling it on a faster machine and then loading the resulting binaries onto the old computer using some sort of temporary Linux installation. I'm thinking that there won't be much speed to be gained by compiling for old hardware unless you are running something strange with special features like a Winchip or something like that.

5) I wonder if Sa3atsky is suffering from information overload yet? That should teach him for asking a question that might be related to anyones distribution preferences! Hopefully he is hunting down some more memory so that old machine will have a chance to actually be fun.

I run the live CD of DSL on my P150 IBM Thinkpad.

It works incredibly well, though I did need to create the
boot floppy and tell it to run at 800x600 display
("fb800x600", if memory serves.)

One nice thing about DSL; you can try it without installing
it - if it works, then you can install it to the hard drive.

How much ram was on that Thinkpad?

I have run DSL about 2 years ago, as an install. It was fast then, so must be souped up even more now.

Yeah I think it is bus limitations on the 100Base Tx NICs.

Shane Brookes is an Aussie developer who was then in the southern states of the US when I originally saw the product, tried it, and loved it, in about 1999. He is now back in Australia, speciallising in embedding windows, and gleefully points out he has 98 running off a USB plug without a HDD, about 2 seconds from powerup, POST and ready to use Well worth reading his websites imho.

I'll bet !!!

I think if he can pile as much memory in as possible it would not hurt. Looking back, I'm pretty sure I ran Win3.1/3.11 and OS/2 Warp 3 on 4Mb RAM! (but not very fast)

I think I had 16Mb RAM when I tried Warp 4 and the dreaded Win95, not the one that more or less worked (OSR2) but the original sales partner one from the "roadshow".

I ran a p100/16, later it became a p100/32 and finally a p100/64 (now in the garage gathering dust, and I really must see if I can resurrect it for such a project

I also ran (I think) a p166mmx? maybe a p200mmx? which I tried the original win98 on with 16 megs of RAM which was increased to 32 with considerable speed improvement. It was that which I then tried 98lite on, and it went back to being as fast as win95OSR2 because it uses the explorer executable from that version.

My pair of HP Vectras PII-400 with 192Mb of RAM then came on the scene some 3 years ago, second hand, and I'm still using them, even for beta testing Linspire, as well as running SuSE 9.1 and Win2000 for routine tasks. They had a special custom version of Win95 OSR 2-1/2 and slowed down considerably when I was forced to convert to 98 because of actually needing an updated version of some sound processing software that would not run on 95.

Sorry for all the waffle, I think better with fingers on the keyboard. Feel free to ignore. My claim is that us oldies can get away with murder on a forum if we put enough smilies in there...

I have an HP Pavilion 3100 with 166MHz Pentium. It came with 16 MB SDRAM, 2 GB Hard Drive, and Win 95 OSR2. I eventually filled it to its maximum 64 MB SDRAM, replaced hard drive with larger when old one was getting flakey. Then decided to try installing Linux a couple of years ago.

Used fips to squeeze Win 95 into one partition while creating a second partition. Then installed Mandrake Standard 8.0. This gave me a dual boot Win 95 and Linux. Lilo runs at boot and lets me choose OS. I learned all this from a WIN-95 and LINUX HOW-TO on the Linux Document Project Site (sorry don't have link, but I found site through google)

Amazingly I lost nothing in this process -- I hadn't backed up HD before starting. A real craps shoot when power outages are not unknown so I don't recommend this approach -- but it worked for me. ;-) I'm not sure I would have tried it with less RAM, and am now embarking on buying a new machine because so many new peripherals are USB 2.0 (my digital camera) and my old machine has USB 1.0.

Disclaimer:
Never got the sound to work though I spent a day or two. And, weirdly, I do all my surfing and email with Win 95 because never got around to replacing AOL with a good ISP (recommendations?) Net result: haven't used the linux I installed very much, but it seems to work ok. Want to make it my full time OS, sick of Win 95.

I hope this helps to encourage you.

Google, google, google ...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search

and

http://www.switchboard.com/Internet_...s_Results.html

Local results for isp near Kensington, MD
BID4ASSETS - 3.4 miles SE - 1010 Wayne Ave, Silver Spring, 20910 - (301) 565-9424
Halitek Inc - 7.4 miles SE - 3403 East West Hwy, Hyattsville, 20782 - (301) 853-1200
Primanet Communications - 7.4 miles SE - 3403 East West Hwy, Hyattsville, 20782 - (301) 270-8900

I'm certain these are all dialup ... check with your cable and telephone companies (personally I prefer DSL over cable) ... try to pick on were the tech support is based in the country you are living in (the US).

I can run USB2 camera, USB2 A4tech 2wheel mice, USB2 4port hub and USB2 scanner all on my USB1 ports. I have a friend who runs a USB2 printer on a 1.1 port.

All that it means (simplified) is that you don't get the blistering high speed of USB2's data transfer.

Don't change your computer just because it isn't USB2 - unless you want to use something that has to run on USB2.

The sound cards on my HP Vectras don't work with most regular Linux, although they work in SuSE (versions 8, 9, 9.1) - perhaps because they have JACK

All the info sites tell me that Aztech soundcards are not supported. I believe them

Thanks to oprogue and eagles-lair, I will look into your suggestions about ISP and USB. Don't know much about hardware and was afraid I'd fry something if I plugged a USB 2.0 into a USB 1.0. Trying to get the hang of using this forum, should I post this elsewhere?

LinuxQuestions.org > Forums > Linux - Hardware > Wanna run linux on very old pc seems to be the right one to me... step back one level to LinuxQuestions.org > Forums > Linux - Hardware > and I think it's pretty well right on looking