Well I recently had RedHat9 crash on me for no aparent reason and it appears the only way to fix it is a re-install.

The machine was being used as a web server, no changes were made it just simply stopped working. (Try to Beleive this cause it happened)

I was thinking about re-installing RH 9 but I dunno if I trust it anymore...

Machine is going to get upgraded eventually but for now it's a dog

specs:

Intell Celleron 300a clocked to 464MHZ (running this way for like 8 years)
80 Gig HD (plugged into UDMA 100 card) MB only supports UDMA 33 and 66 on raid controller

128 megs of ram (PC 100)

DVD Player and CD Burner.

The Primary use will be a web server (with low traffic) followed by some development software (file editors etc) but nothng too extreme.

I do have linux/unix knowledge but nothing super as I am still learning...

THANKS!

i dont know, im satisfied with suse linux, i would recomend it

I don't think any particular distro is notable better or worse than any other for those particular jobs. In other words, choose a distro that's on overall a good distro, not because it's especially well-suited for that particular job.

You may want to go a little `light' on trading computer resources for eye candy (IOW, use fluxbox instead of gnome(*)), but that doesn't imply using a `light' distro (say, Damn Small Linux).

(*) and generally use command-line tools over gui ones, since they tend to use somewhat less memory.

I'm a happy debian user, and my primary tasks are running a low-traffic web server and writing code. So debian will be good enough.

It's the only distro I've tried (in the sense of being the sysadmin of), so I won't claim it's better or worse than other particular distros (okay, it's better than Lindows ^_^, but hey...)

hth --Jonas

If you prefer to drift away from Lindows... This is the beginning of wisdom! :-)

I would recommend as well Debian. It gives you more control than Lindows, is reliable and yet easy to install. Moreover they have an awesome package management tool (apt-get) that downloads and installs all the dependancies you need when you try to install a package.

If you are on a religious quest for purity (i. e. want to control and compile everything), you can try gentoo but the installation is more complex.

I recommend debian testing. It works great, is very easy to install, has great package management, etc.

There are some things I don't like about debian (longer startup then freebsd) but it sure is good.

You could also try freebsd, which is great as well. Freebsd boots up very fast and I think it's cleaner then debian. But the package management isn't as mature (don't get me wrong, ports is great)

For debian I have a page about configuration, where I try to use main stream easy methods to achieve a fast system: http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure

and here a page about light apps:
http://users.skynet.be/six/gpure/tech/linux/apps.html


And before I forget. You could try Damn Small Linux too.

grtz,
gunnix

If you are good at linux Debian or SuSE are both superior OSes. Debian because it like SuSE is maintained by a larger group than the others. Debian if you like to configure EVERYTHING and SuSE if you like the OS to do the work for you.

That's not my impression of debian. Of course, you have to configure something, but once you get deep enough into GNU/Linux, you'll want to do that.

But it's far from everything--AFAICT, gentoo and slackware are `worse' (*), at least according to harishankar (see http://jonaskoelker.homeunix.org/~jonas/advocacy.shtml | grep debian for a link).

(*) worse in the sense of `does this more'. Whether or not this is a good thing depends on you. <thing> is in the eye of the beholder.

my $cents = 2; # --Jonas

I'm always wondering why folks like to overclock servers.
A 50 MHz 486 was able to serve 50 web hits per second.
A 1 GHz P3 with 1 GB of RAM can host thousand web sites with PHP and SQL.
This web server here has 128 MB of RAM, so obviously it is not running microsoft.com or some other sort of porn. Downclocking seems to be a sensible thing to do to run this oldtimer in relaxed thermal regime.

There is always Slackware...runs light, is damned fast, and is a very common server solution.

Ok well I tried UBUNTU since a friend recomended it. It does not find my network card

3Com Etherlink III ISA....It also does not detect my ATA 133 card that my HD is plugged into so I cannot install it!

I'm thinking I might try Debian. next. I hope I don't have to download too many GIg's of OS and waste too many CD-R's My time is valuable so I may end up installing RED HAT again

Downclock my PC are you nuts? It's slow enough! It's just for a personal website where I can post desert pics riding my ATV etc... Actualy, running a celly 300a @ 464 does not require ANY voltage increase so there for there is not any REAL thermal runaway. The only extra heat is from processing more data faster which a 450 celleroan would be doing anyways.
Not to mention that this machine is the most stable computer I have ever owned, much better than some non overclocked PCs I have had the pleasure of owning. Stays up forever.

edit: Tried to Download Debian... 14 CD's...No Thanks...I have a feeling the 108 MB file is not going to work correctly.

Looks like there are several versions of SUSE which should I try? 10.0?

For SUSE do I just need the first CD?

For debian, you don't have to download 14 CDs. Those 14 CDs are the entire distro (think of it at equivalent to reading all posts here on linuxquestions).

You don't (generally) do that. What you (at least could) do is download the net-installer CD (one CD) which contains an installer and some packages. That's enough for the base system. Then you download the rest if and when you need it.

I suggest you examine debian.org a little closer, perhaps also visit #debian@freenode.

FYI'ly yours --Jonas