Good evening to all. I have a very old Fujitsu Siemens Primergy Econel 200 that I want to use as a server. It has 512mb Ram and 4 HDD's of 2TB each. I installed Mint 18.1 but at start-up I get a message that I have no video acceleration. It appears this is a problem associated with Mint as when I tried a live CD with Ubuntu 14.04 I did not get the same message. Can anyone suggest what I can do to correct the problem? If Mint is not compatible ( I love it as I use the same OS on another 4 machines) what would be a suitable OS to go for? (Mint runs very well on a number of machines I have from the same era like a Fujitsu Siemens Esprimo and a couple of Dell Optiplex 745's. I have no problem adding RAM to the Primergy if needed.

Hey pconstantatos,

With that amount of memory, especially for a server, I would stick to the command line. Install any distro you like that offers you the option of a bare bones install that you can build on afterward. I wouldn't even install xorg unless absolutely necessary and definitely not a GUI of any kind. My own linux (Arch, in my case) server is configured this way, even if it has a lot more RAM. I do all my accessing remotely through ssh.

My 2 cents ... ;-)

Likely because the 8mb ATI RAGE XL does not support acceleration. Boot the Ubuntu live CD and go check the logs to see which xorg video driver is loaded. Check /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Then boot Mint in single user mode (command line only) and check the same log file to see if Mint loaded the same driver.

When posting back, you can attach a copy of the log file to help troubleshoot by selecting the "Go Advanced" link. Post a copy from both if you can't comprehend what you see in them for comparison sake.

+1

I would agree. I found a thread over at the Mint forums concerning someone else who had this same issue. You can see it here.

Most likely, you are running in software rendering mode in Ubuntu, as well. If so, for some reason, it's not saying anything about it. To verify this while running Ubuntu, you can open a terminal and run the following command...

If you get an error message, you probably need to install the utility that provides this information...

Disclaimer: Be careful with commands that are prefaced with "su" or "sudo." They will essentially allow root access to your system. Mistakes could possibly damage or even destroy your OS.

Please post the results along with the information Brains has requested.

Regards...

are you sure you have 8TB of hd? it has no relation to your other hardware, you would have been much better off to buy only 6TB of hd and spend the rest on some newer computer.
in any case, 512mb of ram is not much, not even for a server.
linux mint is not a server distro.
you can forget about running a gui decently on that machine; i recommend debian stable.

Thanks ladies and gentlemen
I installed ubuntu server 16.10 and all seems to run smoothly.
I found two more DDR1 Ram X 1GB and plan to install those as well. And yes, I have 4 HDDs of 2TB each and two external (2TB each) on a dock. So this makes 8 internal + 4 external

You're welcome

Regards...