Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

I've decided to keep my old 33MHz computer and refurb what I can and put Linux or Unix on it. I know absolutely nothing about either, other than the name RedHat. Someone with patience want to clue me in?

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-Joshua
Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.

Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Twin Cities, MN
Posts: 1683

33mhz? You honestly can't do a whole lot with that. If you throw linux on there, you probably won't be wanting to run the GUI at all, which, IMHO, is a necessity unless you REALLY want to get your hands dirty learning command line computing.

As for RedHat, that's just one of the distributions of Linux, and one of the more popular ones. There are a whole bunch of them, Redhat, Mandrake, YellowDog, Corel, etc.

I've played with Redhat and Mandrake. Personally, I like the utilities (namely the installation) that Mandrake provdides over Redhat.

They all install linux, it's just that different distributions may bundle different packages of add-ons.

Hope that helps...I'll defer to those that are MUCH more linux-capable than myself...

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We're all naked if you turn us inside out.
-David Byrne

Registered: Oct 2000
Location: Aberdeen, SD
Posts: 2531

the refurb is going to include a larger hard drive and faster processor. Hopefully I can add more RAM, but it depends on finding higher capacity SIMMs chips. It has 8 slots and 20MB RAM. I'm trying to figure out how they have that laid out.

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-Joshua
Abortion: Darwinism at its finest.

Registered: Feb 2000
Location:
Posts: 638

I was working on a linus box a little while ago, and it was plenty fast with only a 66MHz processor. Unlike Windoze, it does not take much to run the GUI. Most of the processor speed is spent on the applications themselves.

BEN

Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Twin Cities, MN
Posts: 1683

FWIW, I am running Mandrake on a Pentium 133 with 48mb Ram, 10 gig HD. It is PLENTY fast enough to handle FTP, HTTP, and File serving just fine. However running the KDE GUI IS a bit sluggish. That could be the Video card more so than the processor.

Just a bit of info for comparison.

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We're all naked if you turn us inside out.
-David Byrne

Registered: Dec 1999
Location:
Posts: 239

My first Linux installation was on a 386 16MHZ, 8MB RAM, 300MB HD. I didn't have a CD-ROM drive, so I downloaded the whole thing from ftp.cdrom.com (86MB at 28.8Kbps, gagh, never again). I honestly believe that it ran as fast as my 486 50MHZ running Win 3.1.

My bad luck is that every PC I load Linux on, it seems that I end up with and ATI video card. This is not by design, just random bad luck. ATI cards don't seem to like X-Windows, it has had varied problems from not working at all on that 386 to some bad scan lines on a Cyrix Penitum II clone I am using now.

Just my experience. I hope you have a good install, and have fun! I am a Sun worshipper from way back, and think that everyone should use Unix, anyway. Welcome!

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Soul Raven - "Sm� hjerne, stor gl�de"
Wherever you go, there you are.

Registered: Mar 2001
Location: Champaign, IL
Posts: 200

Hardware compatibility is something you have to be careful of if you move to Linux. For example most cheap bundled PC modems require Windows, and hence cannot work with Linux. When I tried to install Linux about two years back it wouldn't recognize my graphics card (a Chromatics!), sound card (Aureal Vortex1) and WinModem. Although the desktops worked they were ridiculously slow and 640x480 is just ridiculous period. I don't know if new versions of Linux/XFree would fare any better with that old hardware setup. I did upgrade my machine, but haven't tried Linux again.

So check the Linux product boxes and websites carefully for old hardware compatibility information.

Registered: Sep 2000
Location: Rochester, NY
Posts: 284

quote:

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My first Linux installation was on a 386 16MHZ, 8MB RAM, 300MB HD. I didn't have a CD-ROM drive, so I downloaded the whole thing from ftp.cdrom.com (86MB at 28.8Kbps, gagh, never again). I honestly believe that it ran as fast as my 486 50MHZ running Win 3.1.

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Yep, first box I installed Linux on was a 386SX-20 with 4MB RAM and an 80 MB HD. Yessiree, back in those days the kernel would take up a whopping 128k!

And none of these fancy distro's like you've got today. No sir! I had to download it via email and put it on floppies. SLS 1.0 release, it was, and a pain to install, too! Thank heaven for Slackware 0.9!

GUI? What's a GUI?

Ok, time to get a bit serious.

The only distro's I've ever had good luck with installing and maintaining have been Slackware and Debian. Debian has a better package management system, if you're into that sort of thing, but the Slackware tarball packages are a more "traditional" Unix package format. To me, the Slackware file system layout is more familiar as well, and closer to other Unices than the others. These things make it far easier to update and augment the system than those with full-blown package management systems (though I do admit, I like the Debian package system, with the ability to auto-update the system via their apt utilities).

So that there is no confusion, I hate Redhat. I've been installing these since the 3.X series, and I have never had an installation that went smoothly. If the installation actually ends with a running system (it typically doesn't), the "wonderful" GUI config tool usually fixes that. Fixing config problems without the GUI tool is a major pain, as Redhat has seen fit to use their own ideas of how a Unix system should be configured, which results in a simple config change (say, hostname for example) requiring the hand modification of 3-5 different files. This wasn't on funky hardware either. The last time this happened was on a PII 300 with an ATA-33 IDE drive and 128Mb of memory, and I was installing 6.2.

Ok, enough of my distro rantings. Basically, just pick one of the distro's download it off the net, and try it out. Most of them can be had for free this way. Once you find one you're comfortable with, be sure you support the effort by either buying the "real" CD's (the only way with Redhat), or by offering your services (perhaps by supporting an orphaned package. There are always a few around).

And above all: Have fun!

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Registered: Jan 2000
Location: Twin Cities, MN
Posts: 1683

quote:

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So that there is no confusion, I hate Redhat. I've been installing these since the 3.X series, and I have never had an installation that went smoothly.

---

phew...I always just thought it was me that had that problem.

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We're all naked if you turn us inside out.
-David Byrne

Registered: Dec 1999
Location:
Posts: 239

quote:

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GUI? What's a GUI?

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No doubt. I think I downloaded the Slackware version, and loved the fact that the text was color-coded! That seemed like a brilliant idea to me. Green text for directories, blue for files (or something like that).

This last install was RedHat 6.1, I think. Everything went fine, except for the above-mentioned graphics glitch, which I was more than happy to blame on ATI. The PC really isn't a prize either, an e-Machines with a Cyrix-II 233mhz (Pentium II clone). I don't have any idea how I am going to get the proprietary, built-on-the-motherboard soundcard to be recognized, if at all.

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Soul Raven - "Sm� hjerne, stor gl�de"
Wherever you go, there you are.

Registered: May 2000
Location: St. Paul, MN
Posts: 1429

I was on a 25 mhz SX, for 4 months. I had my network running, and so I browsed the web using lynx, and links (a version that supports tables)

I loved it. though, now it's upgraded. RedHat is the easiest to install, and is the only one that has worked almost flawlessly for me. 7.1 was jsut released today. has the 2.4 kernal built in


It's really fun to do, and you learn a whole lot. And yes, the GUI sucks at that speed. Very much so. It would take 10 minutes for me to load Netscape.

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-miradu

Registered: Feb 2000
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 165

I've been twiddling with Redhat 7 on another partition of my 566 Celeron EMachine running WindowsME (I repartitioned the HD, installed RedHat on the new secondary partition, installed LILO, then restored Windows on the primary partition with Norton Ghost, so I get the LILO menu when I reboot and can choose between Windows and Linux - no boot floppy required ) I've reinstalled it a few times... the GUI installer that comes with the CDRoms is a nice idea, but I couldn't believe how much bloated crap they install if you just chooose the 'Workstation' configuration. The next time around I chose 'custom' and tried to pick and choose only those packages I thought I would need. I'm having a hell of a time trying to get XWindows to work with the Intel 810 graphics chipset that's on the motherboard... I can't get better than 800x600.

Anyway, as far as installing Linux on a 33Mhz machine, I don't know how well it would run XWindows, but it would be more than adequate if you were thinking of setting up your own web/FTP server. I have a couple of friends with DSL who have done this, just to make their files accessible from work. And there's nothing like being in total control of your web server's configuration and feature set. And it never hurts to add an OS to your resume. ;-) You might want to go to the bookstore and browse through the O'Reilly 'Linux in a Nutshell' book, too... it's a great command reference, and it has information on how to use some of the core programs like VI and Emacs along with basic file manipulation commands and the like.

Webmonkey has a tutorial on setting up Linux on an old machine for the express purpose of serving web pages. It's Redhat specific, but it should give you an idea of what you might be getting yourself into:

http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey...html?tw=backend

good luck!

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