[Wolves] What can I run on this machine?

[Matt Wright]

Hi,

I was running, for quite a long time, my internet connection off a 266Mhz 
Cyrix with 128MB Ram and three 2gb hard drives. It served my website, handled 
my email, acted as a NAT'ing firewall for my network and a samba server for 
several years. In the end I got the money to upgrade it and put a 400Mhz 
Celeron in it. The 266 is now sitting in a box that used to be a video player 
underneath my desk in the bedroom and plays mp3's across my network into my 
stereo. Moral of the story? Never underestimate old hardware!! :D

In both cases the 266 ran Debian of some description, usually with a custom 
built kernel. I would suggest you try the ALSA drivers before you ditch that 
ISA soundcard. I had an ALS100+ thing in the mp3 player at one time that I'm 
not sure I'd even be able to find windows drivers for that ALSA supported 
easily. It's worth a check.

Regards,

Matt

On Sunday 11 May 2003 10:31 pm, AlexG wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I now have a rather old (~ 6 years) AMD K6-233 machine, that I got back off
> my parents.  They decided that they liked it enough to buy a new one, so
> gave me the one I built for them back.  It has a couple of 1.2Gb HDD, an
> ATI All-In-Wonder-Pro PCI card, based on the Rage-2 chipset.  An ancient
> ISA sound card, that i don't think I have any drivers for, i think it will
> run on the old yamaha ones, but I'll need to just try it and see (for the
> price it might be worth replacing with a PCI one).  I've also added a
> network card.
>
> What I want to know is, what version of Linux will run on this?  I tried
> vector Linux yesterday, and although I think I did everything OK, I just
> got a lot or error message when it tried to extract the files.  I have a
> copy of  Debian(1-7) but i couldn't get disk 1 to boot, this might have
> been my fault due to the way I burnt the disk.  (I'll download it again and
> run off another copy.)  I also have Mandrake 9.0/8.?, and possibly some
> older versions of Red Hat.  Any suggestions of which distro I should use (I
> suspect the answer will be Debian) ;)  And what should I install to get a
> system that runs at a resonable speed, with god functionality for day to
> day use?  I would like to have X-windows and a WM, but I don't want to
> stick to KDE as I think this is a little to heavy for it.  Is it worth
> putting on an older distro, and then updateing the Kernel, or is this a
> waste of effort when a 'vanilla' install will do?
>
> Regards,
>
> Alex

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