http://www.imgburn.com/ has been fool proof for me. Download the full Iso, (more tools included in it than base for newbies), Md5sum check it first (use a windows md5sum checker like in the link). Don't use cdrw disks. At least for me old laptops cdrom drives have hissy fits with booting cdrw disks. Use cdr.

Then burn the iso image to cd using the image button in Imageburn. Pretty foolproof if you follow my steps.

Just to prove a point.

I sold that rig a long time ago with AntiX on it to someone wanting a cheap Linux Laptop.

Oldest IBM Laptop I have now running AntiX is a IBM a22m with 512mb or ram ok.

1 members found this post helpful.

I was speaking to my son (who is probably old enough to be your father) about your resuscitation of an old machine - he is a collector of old Apples (my other son, slightly younger, makes cider, I've only just realized that ha, ha!) - he pointed me to a couple of sites you should look at:

The first he mentioned is AbandonWare - which is not actually a site, but, either look on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

for an explanation (this contains links), or Google the term for more sites.

The second is the Internet Way Back Machine, which is at:

http://archive.org/web/web.php

or look at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine

for more info.

These sites may be the source of some suitable software for your project.

Hope this helps (you must be beginning to regret having made this post)

dmk

1 members found this post helpful.

I am guessing by now that old computer should be up and running some form of light weight GNU-Linux OS

Yep, imgburn is a doddle. Download the iso file, find where you saved it, click on it, imgburn opens, click to burn. As said above, don't use a RW disk, and burn at 1x speed.

WinMD5 is really easy to use, too.

1 members found this post helpful.

The project is held back a bit due to my recent obsession with my newly installed ubuntu software on my laptop. As soon as I get everything in place on my laptop (my internal hdd died and I got the chance to install ubuntu but now I'm at ground zero and need to recollect my files) I will get back to my project. I will definitely give it a try though and post the results here!

You should consider NetBSD for this machine.

I have a ten-year-old Apple iBook G3 700MHz with 256MB of RAM running it happily with X, Office, etc.

NetBSD makes Linux, and even FreeBSD, look like hungry resource hogs. (There is a port for ATARI computers!!!)

1 members found this post helpful.

Hello,

I have a laptop with similar specs, and it runs just fine with TinyCore Linux: http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/

It's not as friendly as Ubuntu, Mint and others, but you'll learn it fast.

Hope it helps.

Cheers.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hey Stellideli,

I realize your last post was over a month ago, but I can help. Don't waste your money trying to download Antix onto a CD. A Pentium II is not going to run it, same for Bodhi. I have an old Pentium II on my workbench right now and the only OS I've found so far that's easy to use and runs on it is DSL(Damn Small Linux). Puppy will behave kind of clunky and I haven't tried the Absolute yet.

Also, the BIOS will not talk to a HDD much over 5.2 GB, so don't waste your money on bigger drives. You can add more of the same size drives, the Mother board should have 2 IDE ports, so you could add 2 more HDD's. The RAM is hard to get and expensive for this machine.

If this machine is going to function as doing writing (text), or maybe a point-of-sale purpose, it should do just fine. Browsing the internet, it can but won't be pleasant. Sending data if you can find a netcard (nic) that works it should be great. Many of these systems were VESA or EISA card slots, some were PCI slots or a mixture of both. If you have the non-pci type motherboard, good luck in finding a NIC.

This machine is still a useful tool, the win98 isn't. MSDOS 6.2 would run on this machine and so would other types of DOS such as FreeDOS. Loaded with the old MSDOS and GWBasic, this would be a great gift to that budding software genius you have for a kid.

antiX will work just fine on a Pentium II with 192MB, some users here even have run it with only 64 MB. Never tried Bodhi on such a low spec machine, but the website states clearly: Where did you get that (wrong) info from? I have successfully run even Pentium I machines with bigger harddisks and a machine from the same era (AMD K6-2) with a 60GB harddisk. If there is such a limit (which was there for some boards) they usually where either at 8GB (limit of long time BIOS functions, INT13h, can easily be circumvented with having the boot-partition in the first 8GB or using a modern bootloader), 32GB (software problem with divide overflow, can usually be fixed with a BIOS upgrade) or 128GB (hardware problem with some EIDE controllers, easily solved with a modern kernel with LBA48 support, even Windows 2000 with SP4 can do that).
What? VESA Local Bus was already obsolete in Pentium I machines, since it heavily depended on the memory bus design of the 80486 CPUs. There were only very few boards with VLB bus for Pentium CPUs, and none I ever heard of for Pentium II. Most Pentium II boards have a mix of PCI and EISA slots (usually 1 EISA and the rest PCI). Not to forget AGP.

@stelladeli I believe you will love to see this:
Cyrix 250Mhz, 96Mb RAM, 30Gb hd, 32Mb video card (this used to have only 64Mb RAM, luckily i got some on a trade) .
Pentiun II 700Mhz, 256Mb RAM, 40Gb hd, integrated 32Mb video card
Running Debian 6 on both machines, it is a custom install with custom kernel, all software carefully selected, must be lightweight to don't stress the old hardware.
Here another image of the Cyrix running Debian 5.

When people say: "throw that away" DONT listen to them, such machines will become very rare in short time, specially the ones that still working, maybe will worth a lot in 30 or more years !! Time will tell us.

As far we can install new system on it yes, unfortunately kernel.org won't provide support forever, just a few days ago they have decided to drop support for i386 family this will probably happen to i486 some time in the future as well and so on. We still can use old kernels though.

Treat well your old machine, those are rare and you wont find many around anymore. If you can spend a little money with it without hurt your pocket why not, maybe a little more RAM, maybe you find someone that have some parts throw in the garage and can come up with some trade or exchange for something else, we never know!

Here some links that might help !
https://harbhag.wordpress.com/2010/0...ons-for-linux/
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/software/

Regards

Tobi,
Sorry, my P2 died so I can't test it right now.
I'm looking at a Pentium III, HP Pavillion 9860c sitting on my workbench and running DSL right now. It has 1 EISA slot, 4 pci and 1 agp. It barely runs DSL. It would not run Bodhi and ran like a slug with Antix, had issues with even booting antix. This machine is way better than Stelli's pentium 2. I have an Athlon4 that loves Antix and should be about the same as a pentium3, but runs circles around it. DSL was designed to run on older hardware, Antix and Bodhi are not. Absolute is a minimal distro, runs on my Athlon4 a little clunky, but it is not Newbie friendly. As far as the Hard-disk drive size/bios limitation, I have at least a dozen computers in my garage that say otherwise. You didn't start getting the bigger drives/bios until the P3 motherboards. It might be the P2 series addressed 20GB and maybe I'm thinking the 5GB were the 486 series, but 15 years ago drives were about $1/MB, you had to be quite rich to buy a 40GB HDD, so there was not much of a push to build motherboards that could address large drives. I remember quite well saving for months to buy a 300MB drive that cost me $375 in 1995 at Fry's, about the cheapest computer stores in N.Am at the time. Big drives just weren't being put into Desktop's back then, too damned expensive.

Stelli should read this article: http://www.osnews.com/story/24936/Da...Still_Damn_Fun

Then there is something seriously wrong with that machine. Until the machine died last year I had plain Debian with LXDE running on a Celeron 550MHz (the Pentium III version of the Celerons) machine with 256MB RAM without any problems. If you can only run DSL on such a machine it is either faulty hardware or serious misconfiguration that stops you from using something better. The hardware should have no problems at all with running a standard distribution with lightweight software.

antiX is in fact designed for running on older hardware. From the antiX website:While Bodhi is not specifically designed to work on older hardware this capability comes as a side effect of Bodhi's design philosophy to only provide a minimal install that the user can build on.

Sorry, but you simply are wrong with this. As stated before, I had back in the time no problems to run my computers with larger harddisks. A Pentium II system should at least run 32GB disks without a BIOS update, but usually they can run larger disks. I had exactly one Pentium I laptop that had the 8GB limitation, which could easily be circumvented with keeping the system partition in the first 8GB.

But anyways, we are derailing the thread. The point is that the OP's machine should have no problems at all to run antiX, Bodhi or simply an all-purpose distro with a lightweight environment.

inxi -F
System: Host: antiX1 Kernel: 3.5.0-antix.2-486-smp i686 (32 bit)
Console: tty 0 Distro: antiX-base Edelweißpiraten 22 August 2012
Machine: System: VIA product: VT82C693/A
Mobo: Gigabyte model: 693A-596B-8671 Bios: Award version: 4.51 PG date: 07/06/00
CPU: Single core Pentium III (Coppermine) (-UP-) cache: 256 KB flags: (sse) clocked at 731.410 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA NV17 [GeForce4 MX 440]
X.org: 1.12.4 drivers: nouveau (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) tty size: 159x70 Advanced Data: N/A out of X
Audio: Card: Creative Labs SB Live! EMU10k1 driver: snd_emu10k1 Sound: ALSA ver: 1.0.25
Network: Card: Realtek RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet driver: r8169
IF: eth0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: 00:1e:2a:b7:56:34
Drives: HDD Total Size: 20.5GB (-) 1: id: /dev/sda model: ST320423A size: 20.5GB
Partition: ID: / size: 18G used: 4.9G (29%) fs: ext4 ID: swap-1 size: 0.53GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
Sensors: None detected - is lm-sensors installed and configured?
Info: Processes: 65 Uptime: 2:49 Memory: 87.3/501.4MB Runlevel: 5 Client: Shell (bash) inxi: 1.8.23


and see tests by users in this thread

http://antix.freeforums.org/post2499...lit=PII#p24999

You can look at DSL :http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

It is listed as being able to run on a 486 with only 16MB of memory.

That small might not get you X, though when I was using a 486 with 8MB it was possible using Slackware.

With 192MB there should be more than enough memory to get a basic system running with a lightweight X environment - you might need a bit of swap for anything like KDE though, and expect it to be slow.

As for using large disks - The only BIOS issues were that you had to keep the kernel within the first 1024 cylinders or the BIOS would fail. So if you created a boot partition of 200-600 MB, there shouldn't be a problem. Check the cylinder limits during partitioning though.

Don't forget to run memtest86 on those old boxes. Bad RAM can be a quirky thing that leads to many issues, that are mostly unpredictable.

As much as the old tech still works, the newer tech does have advantages over those things. Both in speed and power management. You can almost justify the upgrade these days with the savings on the power bill. Which was a justification I used to get a stand alone router. With 1A being 120W or something like that. So my laptop is almost 4x 60W lightbulbs (pre-LED) worth of power usage. And the stand alone router is basically 2x 60W lightbulbs. Which when you leave these things on all the time is significant to your power bill. Yes, my dad used to keep all the lights in the house off at all time. Plus a duct fan in the ceiling, instead of running air conditioning.

I'd probably start with an i386 version of debian tbh. But it's not for those new to linux by any means.