What i'd like to know from you fine individuals is what distro and version would be best for a newbie like me on an old comp. that has a AMD-K6 processor at only about 450Mhz and it has about 30MB of ram, too. I was thinking of putting Mandrake Linux on because of the ease of installation and it's rep. for being good for newbies, but how are the older vesions and are the good for my hardware speeds and capacities? or are the betters ones out there?

Mandrake should run fine. It depends what you want to do with it. If you want to run X I would reccomend putting some extra RAM in. If you just want a CLI for a server then it should be fine.

I suggest Redhat 8 i have a 500 Mhz and it works good but i would recomend getting more ram

You really should add some ram if you want a GUI. You will need about 64mb to 128mb more. I find RH and MD pretty easy to install, but Slackware seems to run a lot lighter.

I have a P-233 with 32 mb of ram with MD 8.2 that I use as firewall/router. I install it with a gui to see how it ran. It ran really slow and hit the swap quite a lot. I found that 256mb+ is ideal for a workstation with a GUI. But then again an am inpatient and want things now and don't want to wait for things to load.

alright, thanks for the help guys!

I'm running Slack 9 on a K6-2 500mHz, and the only slowness is when loading KDE. After it's all loaded, though, it's just fine for use. I only have 64mb RAM into it, but will bump it up to 256 when I get around to it

Old comps make great boxes to play around on and test out new software

Son I suggest you read my post. I'm running a k7 and linux is givig me hell. It was designed mainly for intel. And it is not easy.

Hi there OldestFart If you provide a link to the post/thread you are referring to I'll be happy to take a look, also it will clarify your above response

Cool

Just posted on newbie under oldestfart. Its on the first page.

I am running Debian on an old 120 Pentium (no GUI) as a firewall, print server and webserver and it burbles along quite happily. However don't ask me too many questions about it - I am still very much the newbie!

cheers... pix

A newbie...
running a webserver...
firewall...
and print server...
WITH DEBIAN....

Don't be modest Linus, feel free to reveal yourself

j/k

Just seems like setting those things up probably would have taught you a bit, you probably know more than you think.



Cool

That's how linux is, I've found ... you don't realize how much you know until you take a step back and realize all that you've done and learned compared to where you were prior to putting in that first install CD

You forgot to mention saving babies from burning buildings in your off time. That along with picking up hitchikers on your Saturdays, and weaving clothes in the evenings for the less fortunate...



Cool

You caught me out!

Forgot to mention that the machine was set up initially for me by some Debian "experts", then they left me all by meself to look after it...

Forgot too to mention that I have two brothers that are in IT, one uses Red Hat extensively (though he is so high up in the IT department I think he is more an administrator now); the other works for Sun and plays around with different distros just for fun - though when he talks Unix/Linux he is in the stratosphere somewhere and I can't understand him... At the moment he his working on a portal for me that will be self administering for use on my webserver (permissions, logins etc)

Learning fast for sure, but still a



cheers...pix

Damn, is running Debian on an old machine all it takes to get this stature?

My friend and I acquired a bunch of old P90s (a dozen or so) we've taken them apart and put together 5 maxed out ones (p90s, with 12 Gigs HD, 128 Megs of Ram, 2 nics...) and so far we've managed to get Debian up and running on 2 with X running on one of those (still getting errors on the other)

What we want to do tho is try them out as dumb terminals (assuming we can get our hands on a bigger machine (1ghz or so I guess) to be a server for them....or even learn about clusters and cluster them hehe.

Debian seems to work pretty good (we used the net install...took forever tho) although there's a few distros I want to try like Vector and Deli.