Linux for old Hardware

krautmick

I have an old beast of a Compaq Deskpro with a Pentium III -800MHz here, which I would like to turn into a linux box (for stuff like radius, airsnort etc).

It currently has Win2K Server on in, which runs fine with 386Meg RAM and a 40Gig HD.

I downloaded Debian Netinstall, i386 build, to install a minimum Linux build, but it doesn't let me past any install options without showing a screen glitch and stalling completely, so this doesn't seem to work or is incompatible.

What other distro/build should I consider throwing at this?

henbane

Arch should install & run on that hardware.

krautmick wrote: »

I have an old beast of a Compaq Deskpro with a Pentium III -800MHz here, which I would like to turn into a linux box (for stuff like radius, airsnort etc).

It currently has Win2K Server on in, which runs fine with 386Meg RAM and a 40Gig HD.

I downloaded Debian Netinstall, i386 build, to install a minimum Linux build, but it doesn't let me past any install options without showing a screen glitch and stalling completely, so this doesn't seem to work or is incompatible.

What other distro/build should I consider throwing at this?

Stuxnet

if your into that social engineering, have a look at latest backtrack linux, lts built on LTS ubuntu 10.04
should work fine on old hardware with gnome env, you'll hardly be using it as a workstation !! has all the tools you could dream of pre-installed

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/

10-10-20

I've Ubuntu 9.10 server running on a Dell Dimension D300 (300 MHz Dechutes) with 384MB of memory.
I've also got 9.10 running on a small HP thin client with a 700MHz Transmeta with 128MB.
So, no issues installing Ubuntu on all of this old stuff here.

Try run the installer with the "cli lowmem=1" option. You can also change the VGA settings for the installer by pressing the F1 key to see the various options.
After that, try installing another VGA/AGP card as these can be the sticking points if the install hangs.

krautmick

I use BT5 on my laptop for analysis work etc, but I find it acts very diffently when installed on the HDD. Additionally, the package builds and kernel are rather customised and I feel I may need to recompile the kernel to address some HW issues etc, which I don't fancy doing with BT kernel build.

I got Archlinux running fine on it. I'll try Ubuntu too, although I remain skeptical that this isn't a bit of overkill for this old system

Sidenote:
Its amazing, that the 2 old Compaq Deskpros I have here are still running fine, while 2 old Dell Optiplexes, with much newer and better hardware are after showing up with leaking capacitors and are only fit for the scrapheap now.
I guess that's the price of cheap PCs now, components are clearly not designed to last long anymore.

krautmick

Classic case of RTFM. Using vga-mode=771 and reducing it to a lower VGA level did the trick. Debian seems to be running through just fine now.

Walnutcracker

Puppy Linux is often recommended for old hardware. It is very good but i think Slitaz is better. It's super lightweight and very capable.

rismak7

I have lubuntu on my 2005 era Dell Dimension 5000. The hardware is slightly better on that, but I imagine lubuntu would have little issues with your hardware since it is quite light on resources.

Johnboy1951

New ISOs released yesterday ... LXDE versions so they are light on resources ..... this is the link to the full release ...

http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/pclinuxos/live-cd/pclinuxos-lxde-2011.06.iso

and a 'mini' version, which has very few apps in the ISO, leaving it to the user to install what they want .....

http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/pclinuxos/live-cd/pclinuxos-lxde-mini-2011.06.iso