Pentium pro and XP

[Paula A]

Ahhh the wonderful (and dead these last 6 years) DSL .. Puppy is the modern advice as it will run from the cd on most things, but I seem to remember having fun with it on a 1994 system with it's original windows95 still installed and matrox graphics..

Lubuntu is broken.. it's been broken for a while, it's the old problem of patches on patches with anything that far removed from the "parent" distro.. plus I think it has a "minimum" installer requirement which is stupidly high.

As linux is free why not just download a few likely suspects? I would look at TinyME and Puppy for starters. DSL really I can't recommend because it's been dead for far too long and everything is just too old to update... It's a 2.2 kernel if I remember rightly.. which is off the ark.

I never ever install "full" distros.. only ever put them together from a core base with the bits I want and need. A friend is very happy with Debian lenny (2.6) on a p3-600 with 128 ram.. it's usable.. but I had to build it pretty much from scratch to keep it sensible.. It was a nice evening job and very pleasant being supplied with coffee while showing off some pc skills... We even got his stupid "wrong identifier" wireless dongle working.. which it had never done for windows 2k.

I think the main problems with this antique will be the Matrox graphics and the network hardware.. If it's a NE2000 chances are it's failed. I have 3 and none work.. one day I'll investigate why. Theres enough ram for linux.. that isn't going to be the problem.

http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview and Getting Started.htm

http://tinymelinux.com/doku.php/home

Tinyme is built from pclinux and has a tendency to morph into it if you arent careful.

http://www.techradar.com/news/software/o...ros-683552

I run Ed's Debian (xebian) on my xbox.. well it started off as Xebian but........ 9 year old linux isn't viable.. so I built a "new" one pretty much from scratch using the 3.0 new kernel and stripped down everything else using the original sources as a guide.. Just for a laugh and to prove to somebody it could be done I once installed xp on it.. totally pointless exercise.. it took 15 minutes to boot then froze up as soon as you tried to open the start menu..

I have got really into building operating systems for strange hardware over the last 10 years or so.. I fell out with windows a long time ago (mid 90's) and I'm now of the opinion it's like McDonalds.. all pervasive and not healthy.. My main desktop is Sabayon, my server runs Slackware, my laptops run various including Haiku (a BeOS variant) and AuroraUX and my pxe boot server runs a very small homebrew version of Debian.

If anybody is interested in actually building your own unique linux it can be done.. and is sometimes the real best bet for older hardware, or strange architectures.. I have built modern up to date linux on machines running 8086 and 8088 processors within the limitations of 640k of ram. I'm involved with LUnix development for the commodore64 and the tape image archive project.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Good read if noting else

[ed731pdh]

Thanks, will download this morning and see what happens.

Scary looking through boxes of computer bits, found a complete boxed set of Windows 3.0, complete boxed set of wfwg 3.11, complete boxed set of Dos 6.0, boxed set of Windows 3.1 and a boxed set of Windows 95. Signs of a misspent youth and bank account I suspect.

[ed731pdh]

The network adaptor on the board is in working order, NT found it and worked the port quite happily. The graphics card is another matter, it works but as you say it's so old getting any operating system other than NT to work with it would be a challenge. Forgot all about the Compaq diagnostics embedded in the primary HDD, it reports 2048k video memory (yipes) and the network adaptor is a Compaq Netelligent 10/100 TX UTP comptroller. This is almost dawn of man computing.

[ed731pdh]

Tiny Lunux went poof, but got somewhere with Puppy Linux. However, it did struggle with the screen management with chunks of the image not being updated. Paula, you could be right, the Matrox card is probably the breaking point here.

Found a very old (90s) disk, Red Hat Linux, lurking in the bottom of the cupboard. Am tempted at this point.

[Mark Hennessy]

My experience of Matrox cards is that they generally work under Linux, but are just rather slow because the drivers aren't able to make good use of the hardware acceleration features, so have to do a lot of the "donkey work" in software. I've yet to see the symptom you describe. Of course, anything is possible.

It's a real shame, because Matrox made some fantastic hardware. I've got dozens of them, pulled from beige boxes en-route to the WEEE skips. I use a G550 in my Windows machine. My Linux machine uses an Nvidia of some sort because support for the Intel 845G chipset was pulled from Ubunutu/Debian a couple of years back (that was really annoying, as this wasn't publicised, and no mention was made during the exhortations to upgrade to the latest release, and a live CD didn't suggest this would be a problem either - just another reason why I won't be a Linux-only person for some time yet!). Said Nvidia is a wholly average performer under Windows. Ultimately, it's an issue of how much information about the internal architecture of the chipsets is released into the public domain so that drivers can be developed...

I can't quite see from the picture, but that card is using either PCI or AGP, and eBay is full of Nvidia cards that'll fit in there. I'm afraid that if you want to use Linux, that'll be your best bet.

[ed731pdh]

The card is indeed PCI, released long before AGP popped out from under its fathers bedshirt. So old in fact it has Compaq stamped on it.

[Mark Hennessy]

A lot of Matrox cards had Compaq branding on the silk screen...

My first "proper" graphics card was a PCI Millennium II with all of 4MB. It cost me £100. Then a couple of months later I bought another, with twice the memory for half the price. Still have them. Happy days

[Paula A]

I thought there would be problems with Puppy.. My old "main" system about 6 years ago was a P3-600 with onboard Matrox graphics.

I'll have a look around, Debian of the era (up to Etch) ran it very well.

http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/suppor...lay/#Linux

It might be fun getting it to run after installation, but that's where xorg and rc.d come in for loading as a module rather than compiled into the kernel. If I'm honest I think a DEbian disk and just do a "core system" installation, then adding bits, will be the way to go.. and lots and lots of fun

Falko writes superb guides.. This is really the way to deal with linux on last century hardware.

http://www.howtoforge.com/the-perfect-de...an-squeeze (squeeze is "oldstable now, but perfectly adequate.. and will allow itself to be updated to "stable" or even "testing" in stages.. so long as you are careful of a circular libc6 dependency)

If you happen to have something sort of booting it's possible to find out exactly what the hardware thinks it is.. I use Slax KillBill edition, but dsl or any running live cd will work the same way (for a simple prompt start for puppy try the boot parameter puppy=nox and then cd / (change to root directory.. dsl may ask for sudo su - to allow access.. there is no live cd password.. the prompt may or may not change.. then lspci -v will list pretty much all the hardware either plugged in or soldered to the motherboard.. For the same with DSL it's DSL 2 at the boot prompt (runlevel 2.. prompt only).. DSL 1 is "single user" mode.. like windows "administrator safe mode" but with control of the system.. more like admin dos prompt.. care !!

Lifesaver.. it really is when things don't want to work. How many times have I used that working out what drivers a windows computr needs but refuses to install.. Grrrrr.. Dell soundcard hardware and drivers.. arrrrrgh!!!!

Just for a giggle (and to test a forum function) .. The video hardware on this laptop from lspci -v command

Code:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x (rev 64)
    Subsystem: Compaq Computer Corporation Device b160
    Flags: bus master, stepping, medium devsel, latency 66, IRQ 11
    Memory at 40000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
    I/O ports at 2000 [size=256]
    Memory at 41000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
    [virtual] Expansion ROM at 20000000 [disabled] [size=128K]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel modules: atyfb

#####

juliadream@juliadream-laptop:~$ uname -a
Linux juliadream-laptop 2.6.32-38-generic #85-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jan 25 13:59:45 UTC 2012 i686 GNU/Linux