and it runs great.

I rebuilt an old poeplePC first gen machine for my buddy's daughter, sh'es just gonna use it for IM, e-mail, WWW, the occansional book report, music etc.

I was surpirsed (ok, not really) how well Mandrake runs on such an old machine.

Hi plbowler.

My old machine is almost the same and it's running MS Windows 98 SE. Now that I see your post, I want to recover it.

The specifications are:
Processor: Celeron 333 MHz
Memory: 256 Mb DIMM
Sound: SB16
Video: SiS 6326 (Embedded)
CDROM: Creative Infra 18
and a winmodem (Motorola, I don't remember the reference). It worked fine with Red Hat 7.3

Could you tell me, please, if you had to do any acrobatics in order to run Mandrake properly? Which kernel did you use?

I also want to know if the modem's RPM I downloaded for Red Hat 7.3 could work with Mandrake. I have Yahoo messenger (RPM for Red Hat 9) running perfectly in my new box (Mandrake 10) so I think (I hope) it will be the same with that modem. Any advice?

Thank you in advance.

P.S. Sorry for my fragmented English.

Good to hear...

Actually I just put mandrake 9.2 on and old P150 with 64meg ram - with KDE...

It also runs good enough for my sister to do basic stuff with Kmail and Mozilla - and can play klondike and frozen-bubble.

Turned off unecessary services - don't run graphical backgrounds and textures and stuff. Only run a couple of apps at any one time, etc. Not running sound on that box either yet. Just set it up for a internet box...

I was surprised to see an old box like that work. A celeron 333 with 128 should be pretty good...

Just a note also.... I have had a 6326 video going but it wasn't the best... It did work tho... The SB16 also works tho will probably need a config tool run to access it.

Hello!
It's Mandrake 10, I think the kernel is 2.4 but I could be totally wrong.
I didn;t cahnge a thing, I made it a Owrk/INternet/media station, all that on a 6 gig HD and I have 2.7 gig left. Config things load a bit slow (eg Mandrake control Center) but Firefox works great, once it's up and running. I used Kepene (sp?) as the IM service, worked fine with MSN, couldn;t get yahoo account to work but I didn't poke around with it at all. I use Gaim as my IM program on WinXP and I love it, I'll probably install that on the LInux box before I'm done. I have two more of these celeron 333(ish) machines laying around, I'm impressed (but not surprised) how well it runs. there is a bit of waiting for stuff to load, but onc ehte programs are running they respond great. Just have to get this old CD Burner running if I can (HP 9100) then I'm on to the next machine.

Mandrake 10 should use a 2.6.3 kernel by default...

Hi guys.

That old box of mine will be working (soon, I hope) as an office machine: KWord, KSpread... (Open Office? I doubt it, but I'll give it a shot).

Amosf, you're right: SiS 6326 is not the best, not even close. Yeah, all the eye-candy stuff will be obliterated <sigh>.

When I installed Mandrake 10.0 on my new box, there was an option to choose kernels: 2.4.25 (by default) or 2.6.3. Since my NVidia driver asked for it, I went to the former. Now I'm wondering: What kernel should I install (on the Celeron)? I think 2.6 is "heavier" but has more support for old hardware (Am I wrong?).

Plbowler, which desktop has that old machine of yours running? Does it stand for KDE? and what screen resolution has your computer? I could only put mine to work at 800x600 when I installed Red Hat.

Thanks to both for your answers.

handles KDE just fine, 800x600 yeah

I installed Mandy 10 on a P2-233mhz 384Mb laptop. It runs great but KDE was slow I thought KDE would run great on that memory but no... Well. We have XFCE4

Okay, my old pile of crap is a little faster than those in this thread (AMD K6-II @500, 384 RAM), and I can watch movies, play 3D games (GeForce 2MX 440/64MB/1280x1024x24), and I even enable ALL eye-candy in KDE3.3. I'm a sucker for that no matter how slow it runs. I'd rather have a desktop that looks the way I like than one that I hate seeing every day and that wouldrun 50% faster.

HOWEVER, Mozilla kills my System. Tried Mozilla 1.4-1.7, Firefox 0.8-1.0pre, Epiphany, Galeon, IE (through wine), NS 4.73 (wined), Links (graphical/non-graphical), Konqueror, Opera. They simply kill my system and I have no clue why. You guys have older CPUs and don't have probs with such browsers.

The only one that rocks is "links -g" and Konqueror that runs well enough to be called "acceptable" with 3 tabs open (as in no scrolling in slow-motion). It takes me more to render a page than to load it in Mozilla& co.

Firefox.9.3 takes a VERY long time to load, but once it's up and running there is not a huge difference between the celeron 366 system and a 2 Ghz system., again it takes forever to load, but once it's up it quite fast.

eqxro

That AMD K6 is just plain slow. I have an old one here too still doing duty. I installed Mandrake 10.0 on it and it was painfully slow. It was slow with 98SE and XP on it also. I have a Celeron 400 128mb PC100 3gig UDMA 33 machine next to it that will run circles around it, with XP and Linux. I also have a little notebook, a Dell cpi 333mhz that runs fine with mandrake. (Not a speed demon, but it is usable enough.) It also runs better than the K6.

The AMD K6 500 takes 3 min. to open Open office org writer.
The Celeron 400 takes 45 seconds.
Mozilla took minutes to open with the AMD. The Celeron 400 will get it open in 20 seconds

You should make sure that your hard drive is being recognized as DMA, and using 32 bit access with hdparm

as root hdparm /dev/hda

Also turn off all processes that are not necessary.

Idling the AMD was at 25% load
Idling the Celeron is at 1% load.

I never did figure that out. I think that K6 just had a problem.