UBuntu on older machines ?

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> > Now that I have just learned that Ubuntu can run on my old Pentium
> > 200MMX board with 256MB of RAM, I can't wait to try.
> > 
> > Vince

> Don't hesitate, just try it - my organisation has 3 pre-233MHz machines
> with linux installed. Just try it then post again.


Okay here is the result with Intel 200MMX board.

First, my board was more clever that I thought, the BIOS did manage to
boot from the CD ! :-)

I put 256MB of RAM on the board, and re-used the original hard drive,
ATA33  3.2GB disk, as I wasn't sure if my bigger disks would work, I
seem to remember there was a size limitation problem with disks around
that time, but I couldn't remember exactly what was the problem. So I
played it safe and just re-used the original drive.

The install took well wellll over an hour, probably because of the disk
that's kinda slow, as Jeff pointed out.

Despite copying all the packages, Ubuntu used only 1.5GB of space,
therefore leaving me with another 1.5GB to play with.

Apart from the on-board sound which didn't work, and Gnome forcing me to
use a 800*600 screen resolution instead of the 1024*768 I used to use on
this machine, everything worked perfectly. Laser printer, external ZIP
drive, Ethernet controller and cable modem/internet, everything was
working fine out of the box.

However it was a bit too slow to be useable, calling a Nautilus window
(say the 'disk' location or 'home' or whatever) took 5 seconds, so it's
not really suitable for daily use.

I am sure if the CPU was only a bit faster, it would work well. But
sadly, 200MHz is already the fastest Pentium one you can get, ISTR.
233MHz maybe. I am sure a dual 200MMX board would be plenty powerfull
enough

However I have recently been toying with the idea of having a second
Linux box to build a local Ethernet network, both to serve some specific
needs I have, but also generally to play with things, experiment with
Network related things, and learn more about Linux.

Typically that's what I would like to achieve/experiment with this
future machine:

1) Put several IDE disks and binds them using S/W RAID
2) Set up an NFS network with the main/other machine
3) Use it to regularly back-up my 10GB or so of precious data from the
main PC
4) Attach laser printer locally and let the main PC access it from the
network
5) fiddle with remote administration, remote control of the PC using
Gnome's 2.8 new tools.
6) local mail
7) Intranet / local web server
8) Other things that will eventually spring to mind as I go ! ;-)

But I need first to buy a decent tower case, screen and keyboard and
mouse hardrive power supply etc, and money is very tight right now.
But eventually this will come to life sometime next year, at which point
I will no doubt bombard this list for help. Be prepared folks... ;o)


Regards,

Vince