My cousin's giving me his old system, to which I'm going to try and convert into a Unix box. My question is this: Is this system good enough to play around with for personal use?

Pentium 233
1.1 GB Hardrive
CD-Rom drive
etc..

Second question is, if it's good enough to convert, what uses aside from what I said above could it have?

Input would be appreciated. Thanks.

Oh, and RAM is either 32 or 64... thanks again.

A *full* install of some of the modern distros will run to over 3Gb if you let it -- but that will generally put so many programs on your machine that you'll *never* use all of them. When I do an install I always spend a little time picking and choosing what I want to have on there -- but if you want to get started fairly quickly (and let's face it, until you've been playing with Linux for a while, you don't really know *what* you want!) Mandrake's installation seems to do a reasonable job of picking the most commonly wanted apps to fit in the available space. I just put 8.2 on one of the machines at home...

It should run pretty well on that machine. The only slowdown, as I mentioned in the other thread, is likely to be if you're running a "hungry" window manager like KDE. I'd recommend installing KDE (and/or Gnome) so you've got one of the "big guys" to play with, see what you think of it, but I'd also install one of the minimalist ones (such as, say, blackbox, which I also quite like...)

And while it should make a pretty reasonable "personal use" box (as with anything you're actually sitting in front of, bigger 'n faster is better... ) it would make an excellent server. I'm running a Pentium 166 Linux box which acts as my LAN's internet gateway, handles my mail, etc, and it's fine. All I want to do is add a 30Gb HDD (or two) to it so my entire network can use it as the common file server as well. I've currently got a cable connection, but it handled the job equally well when I had a dial-up connection. I had a web server running on it with a CGI script which ran the dial-up and hang-up scripts; all you had to do from any other machine was open a web browser and click on a link...

That's the beauty of Linux -- especially to fiddlers like me -- there's always a half-dozen different ways to do something...

Well, have fun, sasso...

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You know, as soon as I posted this I thought "Why not just note darkphoenix?", but figured you'd swing by eventually anyway. Thanks again man, you've been a big help.

(One other point I should make, I guess: I have said a couple of times that KDE et al tend to be a little sluggish compared to Windows. This is, of course, compared to Windows '95; I have no idea what sort of resources are required to run something like 2000 or XP, but I suspect KDE would run rings around them on the same hardware...)

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[:: I support $jark :: Read why ::]
[:: Check out my NaNoWriMo 2005 novel! ::]

--
[:: I support $jark :: Read why ::]
[:: Check out my NaNoWriMo 2005 novel! ::]

Personally, I'd just set it up as a firewall... although you can do that with a $20 486 from ebay (as long as you can find one with a PCI ethernet card )

This flat currently has a Pentium box running as a firewall, going into a 4-way hub, which feeds into a RedHat box (which is a personal machine-cum-fileserver), this box (Mandrake/Win2k), a WinME laptop and a Win98 laptop, with a printer hanging off the Win98 laptop.

I would say for running X windows your system is a bit lean, but then I'm used to it being fast I guess. But for a server, your system is more than adequate. Just whop in the biggest HDD the mobo will allow, and bob's your dad's brother.

darkphoenix:

Yeah, KDE is a little bit faster, for me, than XP and 2000. And to be honest, the linux distros I use have better hardware support than 2000 :/

one caveat though: although you can run your box as a fairly decent server, I have serious performance problems with my 266 MHz box when I try to run really intensive PHP scripts on it. MySQL is lightning fast, but PHP leaves a bit to be desired on a computer like that. Extra RAM didn't seem to make much difference; the bottleneck was the processor itself.

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