[NTLUG:Discuss] linux & 100 Mhz Pentium

[severian@pobox.com]

Tom,
   On the hardware side, I suggest you raise your standards a bit.  I have 
seen complete Pentium 2/233 computers for $20 several times at First 
Saturday.  If you are buying the machine for this test, that extra $10 will 
get a much more usable machine.  I am not suggesting you throw away a 
machine you already have, but don't buy a P100.  Upgrrade the memory if you 
have spare pieces and  a 233 will be pretty decent.
   On the software side, I will tell you about 2 distros I tried on slower 
machines that worked well.  Of the major distros, Mandrake 9.1 has been 
able to install and be the most usable for me right away.  Try IceWM or 
Blackbox as the window manager.  I like the way Blackbox works better, but 
it seems to vary a lot from person to person.  Mandrake set them both up 
perfectly just by selecting a few options during install.  SuSE has options 
for one or the other, but they did not work right until I installed 
KDE.  KDE and Gnome are just too much for a slow machine like that.  If you 
have a fast internet connecton and patience, you should look at 
Gentoo.  Version 1.4 is out now and Gentoo will get you the best 
performance from the machine because it compiles everything optimized for 
your machine.  You have to do the configuration and it will take 2 or 3 
days to install(it really takes that long to run) on a P100.
   If you want to try FreeBSD, consider 4.8, not 5.1  5.1 is the 
development branch and is not as stable yet.
   If you can do without a graphical window manager, a P100 will do just 
about anything.  I have a Pentium 166 I use every day. It run my 
firewalling, NAT and such.  I don't have X installed and it is more than 
fast enough.

Good luck,
Ralph

In response to the welcome remarks of Tom Tumelty at 09:16 AM 8/19/03 -0700:
>I have got several OSs lately and want to experiment. I got Slackware 9.0, 
>Redhat 9.0, FreeBSD 5.1, OpenBSD 3.3, Mandrake 9.0 . I was considering 
>buying a $10 dollar 100 Mhz pentium at first saturday....but i might be 
>better off utilizing a couple of extra hard drives i have and partitioning 
>for a multi-OS