Hello!

I have this:

-Mother S630MP with VIA C3 Samuel 2 processor (non PAE, no cmov and no cx8). BIOS:1.00
-RAM: 1GB
-Disk: 70GB (35Gb with XP and it works good)
-Video: no video card.
-Internet: USB 802.11 draft-n wireless (Debian 8 recognized it as RT2780.bin)
-Why? Desktop, a very basic PC to read news, write a doc and nothing more.

I want to know: Is it possible to install Slackware 15 for this?
I looked for info but I couldn't found a complete answer. I know, I'm a newbie using old technology. However I took it as a challenge.

What did I do?
I tried to install Slackware 15 (NOT 64 bits) and selected "huge.s".
What happened?
When the installation was at the packages screen, well, It took 12 hours to complete A package. So, one hour later I decided -I was sad, very sad- to shutdown poweroff.

Now I'm installing Debian 8, but I feel that I haven't done enough for installing Slack. It's the grandpa of the distros.

Could you help me? In this case...is it possible to install or not?

If it's possible...what can I do to do a better install?
If it's not possible...what distro do you recommend? (I'm traying with Debian 8 but I'm not sure because during the installation each move of mouse take 10 secs)

Thanks for reading it!

(Yeeeessss I posted! I couldn't yesterday. It's a good step)

You don't mention the GPU responsible for this, or the WM or DE. I put Debian 8 on a K6/2-550 with 256M RAM and Trident CyberBlade/i7 IGP a few weeks ago. GUI basics didn't seem to be as slow as you suggest, but I was using TDE, which is quite light for a DE. I tried an upgrade to Debian 9, but didn't get far before missing CPU instructions brought it to a halt. I'm thinking you need to find something known to run on an Athlon XP at least, something I put on my todo list 2 days ago. Non-support of CPUs lacking SSE2 is growing, which likely means trouble with stale info in your quest.

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Thanks for you answer! I'll post the information about the GPU later. I don't know about WM or DE, because the problem is during the installation, but I'm traying to install xfce. I read that is the better option for this case.

Ok...options. I'm going to make a list with the problems that I found for each one.



Slackware: very slow intallation at the packages screen.
Debian 8: very, very slow installation
Alpine: start but need internet conection. I left it for later.
AntiX: I don't like this option. It'll be the last
Slitaz:next if we can do nothing with Slackware

In 2001, you'd be probably still on USB-1.0, which had specs of 100mA max current, 1MB/S.There were 2 drivers,uhci.o (yes, modules were '.o' and not '.ko' back then) or ohci.o. uhci.o was for intel & via,IIRC. USB-2.0 did more, but back then it was still under 10MB/S if memory serves

They keep saying "Socket 370" in the C3 datasheet. Socket 370 IIRC was the Celeron socket so this is quite probably a 32bit cpu running on a 16 bit data bus. It does MMX instructions so it's '586 all right. I'd go for slackware-11.0 (kernel-2.4.21) or 12.0 (kernel2.6.x).

If you have a decent 1.44MB disk, I believe tomsrtbt is still up there. It reformats your 1.44MB floppy as 1.82MB and installs a busybox OS on it http://www.toms.net/rb. Unusual slowness might be disk errors. I could download an OS faster on serial port modem (max 56k baud) faster than you're installing it. Now you have to unpack the archives to install, but that slow speed is a death knell. Maybe somebody's mucked with the multiplier in the BIOS and the cpu is in revolt.

If you're not restoring it in a museum this btw is a colossal waste of time.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks a lot! I'll probe with Slack 12, I think that the floppy option it's far away for me. Nobody touched this PC, it was bought and abandoned.
I conected the pendrive and used it on Windows XP and it was ok. I'm thinking that the problem could be de disk or maybe the memories.

I'll work on it the next days with the information that both of you gave me,then I'll post again. Promise.

I've checked and it hasn't video card. It's pure mobo. I've updated first post with mobo's model (I think it doesn't add information, because manuals are impossible)

If not a discrete video card, then it must have southbridge or discrete onboard graphics with a 15pin motherboard output, probably SiS or Savage or Trident. So, X might work with an openchrome or savage or sis or trident Xorg (xf86-video-) display driver, and a distro that provides a working version of the appropriate one. If you can get output from lspci -nnk | grep -A3 VGA, or better yet inxi -Gaz that would narrow down which.

Go hunting on ebay. You'll want a pci card, firmware isn't a problem, and X had/has the drivers.Nearly any name you haven't heard of. Savage, S3, Radeon (did linux drivers before 2001). These are glorified D/A cards, not video as we know them today.