I have got my hands on a 1997 Compaq Armada 7770DMT featuring a Pentium II mobile mmx cpu.

Besides Damn Small Linux, is there any other distro that will install on this Pentium II?

Knoppix, Ubuntu and MEPIS won't.

Please, no guesses only knowledge.

Thank you

i ran centos on a p2 no problems. it's not about what distro you use, it's about the applications that run on it. i'd be *VERY* suprised to find anything that won't run on it. KDE3 will always suck on an old machine though, so don't run it. you don't say what doesn't work with those distro's... if they really don't then i'd guess you have other issues unrealted to the p2-ness.

i had redhat 7 on a pentium 90 mhz with 64mb or 32 mb if i'm running short of ram stick , got x in it ... i mean sometime you need to "stabilize" a system with some effort ...

yup ... i also got redhat 7 on a 486 33 mhz(i think so) , also got x in it but i hardly use x with this machine ... go guessing why ...

i mean ... if you are not adapted to "guessing" ... go for a p4 instead ...


//i mean ... it could be fun afterall ...

.

You might like to try Arch Linux (optimized for i686).
Hope that helps.

I have Mandrake 9.0 running on a Pentium 75, Pentium S 120, Pentium II 400, and had it running on a PIII 500 which is now running Mandriva 2006. I've also had Knoppix 4.0.2 running on a Toshiba Satellite 400 something notebook computer, I forgot the exact model, but it had a Pentium 166 processor. I don't have the machine anymore since it wasn't mine to begin with, I only had it in for repairs.
If you want something more modern than yesterday's kernel i'd suggest you try out Mandriva (supposedly now detects available resources during installation and adjusts appropriately), Gentoo, Debian and Slackware and get a feel of the performance on a minimal install.
Just keep an eye out for services you won't often need to run at boot such as Apache in case you're going for a 'standard' install with some distros and don't pick your own packages.

Can you tell us why Knoppix, Ubuntu and Mepis wouldn't install?

just instlled gentoo on a PII laptop- Acer TM330T (128M RAM though..).
Works like a charm... If you don't mind waiting for everything to compile or you can set distcc on another computer...

It was my opinion that the linux kernels is set to compile for a specific CPU type. This is why I expected some to include PII support and some not.

I'll return,

some distributions are heading towards compiling the kernel for i686 architecutre only, but most aren't and i *think* that p2's are officially i686's and p1's were i586's. redhat and co still build to i386 by default.

You're both right. acid_kewpie is probably trying to say that running a bunch of processor intensive applications will obviously be too much for the system to practically handle. In other words, running Icecast or for streaming audio or playing some mp3's will probably tax out that system. It may however be able to run a file server and a web server without issue, as those *generally* aren't processor intensive.

But, you can generally optimize a kernel compile for each specific processor also. For example, i686 on a Pentium II doesn't mean the same as i686 on a Centrino's Pentium M.

Pentium IIs only incorporated MMX. With Pentium III, we obtained SSE - early flavors of the Pentium 4 received SSE2, and later versions of the Pentium 4 also received SSE3. So, if you are compiling for an original Pentium II, you can tell it to ignore the SSE instruction sets altogether. Or for later processors, you can tell it to compile with all instruction sets taken into consideration. I don't know how much of a performance hit this is, but it would undoubtedly help. With almost any distro, you can get a kernel source package and tweak to your liking.

You're right - PIIs were i686. Redhat/Fedora defaults to i386, but now offer now i686 compiled kernels. I don't know however if the installer is smart enough to select the right kernel for you, I would assume it is.

So basically Sonnik, you are asking me to compile a kernel for Pentium II or MMX if possible and make it lean. That'll be a challenge which is why I guess I equipped the antiquity.

Thanks for the explanation all.

try puppy linux it doesn't always have the best sound card support but is getting better since versio 1.08

Not as bad as you may think. Sure, slower than modern processors - but not overly unreasonable.

That's right. Some useless trivia: the "pent" in pentium comes from a prefix denoting 5. (as in 586)

You mean "pent" like in "pentagon"...?


Now to a more serious question:
As I've mentioned I have installed Gentoo on a PII laptop (by acer).
It has a 350MHz proccessor and 128MB ram.
I run XFCE4 on it but it seemd rather slow. Not uselessly slow but still slower than I would want it to be...
This laptop has this "designed for Windows 98/ NT" sticker. As far as I can recall 98 used to be quite fast on such machines (PIIs). Faster than it does now (or it might just be my bad memory...)
What should I ecpect of this computer?

Any way to get it to work faster?
How do I know if that speed is reasonable or have I done something wrong?

Thanks

I have installed slackware 10.2 on both my Armada 7400's (P2, 300mhz) I compiled my own 2.6 kernel I upped the memory to 192meg in both and use kde for the WM, it's pretty slow but once up they work great they work great for what I use them for mail and surfing, and one of them doubles as an alarm clock, dual boot with freedos and LCARS24 off of sourceforge and slackware. I had no issues, install was painless, just did the standard install