How to make a Linux Box...

[tburger]

Hey Everyone-

A guy at work was looking to get rid of an old PC, so he offered it to me...Now I have an old Micron sitting in my basement...=)

What I would like to do is turn this guy into a Linux Box...I've been wanting to get into this for some time, but have always been hesitant about partitioning a drive on one of my primary machines...

The computer is running 256MB of RAM and has Pentium II processor. I haven't booted it up yet to check exact running speed (got it earlier this afternoon), but I was hoping that it might be able to handle a new OS. The computer was originally running Windows 95, but has since been updated to the latest version of 98.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to best approach the project? Any open-source Linux preferences? Are the newest versions of Linux too much for this machine? And, if so, can I get older, perhaps unsupported versions of something like Fedora or Suse?

Any help or install advice would be great...

Thanks

Tom

[pbmods]

Heya, Tom.

I'm going to go ahead and move this thread to the Linux forum, where our resident Experts will be better able to help you out.

[pbmods]

How to make a Linux box:

1. Get it drunk.
2. Make disparaging comments regarding its ancestry.

[archonmagnus]

Hi Tom,

The current distributions should work well with your system, but it will be throttled by the relatively slow front-side bus speed.

I would recommend that you try Mepis Linux or Ubuntu Linux first. Both have live CDs and are (in my opinion) easier for new Linux users than other distributions. Mepis defauls to the KDE desktop environment (taskbar at the bottom), while Ubuntu defaults to the Gnome desktop environment (menu-bar at top, taskbar at bottom).

For more information about the various distributions, you can have a look at distrowatch.

[tburger]

Heya, Tom.

I'm going to go ahead and move this thread to the Linux forum, where our resident Experts will be better able to help you out.

Thanks, I totally missed that option.

Tom

[tburger]

Thanks for the input, archonmagnus... I'll check it out

Tom

[prn]

Hi Tom,

Welcome to the Linux community!

The box you have should work and will work better as a Linux box than it did as a Windows box (in my often not-so-humble opinion ;-) ). Obviously this is not the box for a high-performance test, but at the very least you should be able to get a good idea of whether you'd like Linux as a primary OS.

As for distro, I don't see how you can go far wrong. Mepis and Ubuntu are both good, but there are a lot more out there too. The suggestion from archonmagus of starting out with a live CD is a good one, but I've installed (and reinstalled) often enough that I can say it should not be a scary experience. You have a dedicated experimental box so there's no need to be afraid to experiment. I've got a Fedora Core 6 installation on a comparable PC at the moment (and as it's another experimental PC, I felt no qualms about putting on the whole 9 yards, so it's loaded with every package imaginable). That's not a box I would want to run heavily, but even with all that c**p, it's still not too uncomfortable most of the time. I did manage to stuff 768MB of ram into it, and that helps. :-) It's another test box and I'll probably strip it down and reinstall another distro on it again soon too. In some ways, I think it's good to have a test box with relatively limited capabilities, if only because it makes you feel so good when you move up. :-)

If you connect to the net, DO run a firewall, and don't actually run all the server daemons unless you really need them.

Another thing to beware of is wireless. I have a dual-boot XP/Fedora box in the family room at home (it would be just Linux if it weren't for my son and his silly games) that is connected by wireless. Some distros are a lot better than others for supporting various wireless cards. You can generally make it work with a varying degree of fiddling, but sometimes it will turn out to be easier just to install a different distro (or a different wrieless card). The (U|Ku|Xu)buntu distro(s) are among the better for that, it seems, but as I have said, don't be afraid to experiment. After all, what's the worst that can happen? You might have to reinstall again. Expect to do that several times, it's comparatively painless.

Another hint: make sure to partition your drive (or use two) so you can have a /home filesystem separate from the rest. That is likely to save a fair amount of time over the longer haul as you can keep your personal data there while you fiddle with the OS.

Also, I will note that I like this forum site (a lot!), but there are also others that are devoted primarily to Linux and have whole subforums just for questions like installation, hw support and the like. Thescripts.com is largely a programming site and good for that, but you will find Linux support sites for other topics. Some of them are associated with particular distros and others are more general. I don't think I'm supposed to link to them here, but I also don't think it's that bad to mention their existence because they are more complementary than competitive.

Best Regards,
Paul

[tburger]

Thanks for the great response, Paul.

I booted up the machine this morning. It officially runs at 266mHz and has 320 MB of RAM. The hard drive is partitioned into 3 smaller, 2GB drives.

With a distro a Linux, I should be able to change these partitions, correct?

Tom

[archonmagnus]

Correct, you should be able to use the partition manager application to repartition and format the drive.

[prn]

Correct, you should be able to use the partition manager application to repartition and format the drive.

What he said!

But besides that, what I want to say most is that it's EASY. Most distros' installation routines make this a piece of cake. If the only thing you've ever installed before is MS Windows, I think you'll be very pleasantly impressed with how much nicer your typical Linux installation is. (Maybe not 10 years ago, but it sure is now.)

Oh, I just remembered another hint about partitioning. The installation routine will undoubtedly suggest partition sizes. Most often, they seem to suggest minimal sizes for the boot partition and the system, leaving most of your HD space for /home. That's great except when it comes time to update. I'd suggest that you make your boot partition at least twice the original size (the voice of experience here, it still won't take up a lot). It sounds like your HD is 6 GB, which is just about what a "full" installation of FC6 takes up. You rarely need "everything ", so for a "play-around-with-Linux" box you should be OK, but if you can find another disk to put in, you may find it worth doing. Even a (cheap, used) 10GB disk would make a big difference in available space. There is no doubt at all in my mind that you could fit a usable Linux into your 6GB space, but if you want room to experiment, you might like a little more and it shouldn't cost more than a few bucks even if you can't get a discarded one for free.

266MHz is pretty slow nowadays, but having 320 MB of RAM in it will help. I'd suggest that you aim for a moderately light installation rather than one of the heavier ones. I don't see why you shouldn't try more than one distro before you settle on your favorite, though. One thing you can do if your system is running slowly is switch window managers to one that uses fewer resources. Gnome and KDE are both relatively "full-featured" (I will try to avoid some of the religious wars that advocates of one or another WM can get into) so in a machine with a slower CPU and limited memory, you might look into XFCE or IceWM. I know you can find articles on changing window managers fairly easily with Google (or other search engines, I don't want to insist on a particular one) so I'm not going to try to do that for you.

Anyway, go for it! And HAVE FUN!

Paul

[drhowarddrfine]

I run FreeBSD one box on a PIII with 256Mb but only twm as the wm. xfce and icewm and others run fine but gnome/kde just bog it down.