Pentium pro and XP

[ed731pdh]

Does anybody have any experience installing XP onto a Pentium Pro system? In this case a 1996 Compaq Professional Workstation fitted with a pair of Pro 200mhz chips and 256mb of memory on a pair of SCSI drives. Networking and sound is built in, the graphics card was a then state of the art Matrox Millenium of which I have been able to obtain drivers for XP from Matrox.

It's an old machine, was running NT (yes, the Godzilla of operating systems) but I had a spare gen copy of XP kicking around and was curious if I could bring it into the earlier part of the 21st century.

[Tedzed1]

there should be a way of putting XP onto this system, although it won't be the fastest kid in the block,
do you have the model no, and I will have a look and see what I can come up with,
It may be a better Idea to put a LINUX distro onto it, if all the drivers are available.

[Paula A]

It can be done, but I have tried on a xeon twin system of similar vinatge and specs and it doesn't work.. and there is a reason.. XP relies on the L2 processor cache and the pentium series (and the xeons from servers too until the 466) until the p3 doesn't have it. Some p2 chips such as the P2-400 do have one, but again while it will install it's very buggy and prone to lockups... Annoyingly if you happen to just miss a button!! (old computers are "my thing".. I'm typing now on a Toshiba laptop circa 1996! with a 366 cpu) Of course there is the other huge windows pitfall.. anti virus.. which will eat ALL your system resources.. Windows 2k would be a better bet.. I can let you have a version which has no "hassleware" registration nonsense.

I would suggest trying linux on it.. with 256 ram you will find Ubuntu 10.4 will install nicely and probably work "out of the box".. but if you want to use it for anything productive you will have to get rid of Gnome and run a light desktop like LXDE or XFCE4.. both are very viable, I use lxde on my 2.8 with a gig of ram 512 graphics card 64 bit beast, and my dell 600/256 arch lappy.. This one is a toshiba portege 366/64 and is running a very mucked about with debian kernel and xfce4.. keep to lightweight applications (there are sleek and fast things like Midori web browser, leafpad text editor and all kinds of things) It works well, even managing to play youtube video passably as long as you keep to "hardcore netters watch video in 240" rules

If you have a cd drive it's very easy.. if not you will have to look in the bios and see if you can network boot the thing, or do a very funky install from those obsolete floppy things .. would you believe there is a viable linux distro which comes on 2 floppies??.. It's also possible to actually do a core system install with the correct network hardware drivers in another box and then swap the drives.. all you need is working network and a core prompt and you are away

Interesting topic.. right up my street

[Mark Hennessy]

My very recent experience suggests that Ubuntu is a massive resource hog compared to Win XP, and I wouldn't recommend it for old hardware. It is just about usable on this P4 3.06GHz/2GB machine. I'm building a P3 server machine at the moment, and trawled a number of Linux distros and found that if you want to stay in the Debian family, and don't want to mess about too much, Lubuntu is reasonable. That's on a P3 1GHz/1GB machine. I wouldn't dream of trying to run a linux GUI on only 256MB RAM. Not if you want to use a mainstream web browser.

Pentium Pros do have L2 cache: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_Pro

But I'd agree with the advice to try W2k first

[ed731pdh]

Paula.

Some snaps of "The Beast", quite a meaty bit of kit and very well built. 1996 motherboard fitted with intel series chipset, 441/442FX chipset, ES1868F sound chip, plug in cards sit on daughterboard riser. Pair of Pentium Pro 200 chips with seperate voltage modules. Only ID on motherboard is part number P06260D1GEA544 bar code strip.

Must admit, had not thought of a Linux installation, and found the NT4 op system to be too much like working in the ark.

[Paula A]

ubuntu itself isn't the hog.. it's the monster gnome/kde desktops.. proof?.. this is a compaq armada e500 circa 1999.. has a windows98se product key sticker on the bottom..with 256 ram (800 cpu) running 10.4 like a good one with xfce4.. gnome bogged it down completely.. fast and effective.

Take it from me.. XP will not work on that hardware.. No L2 cache is a deal breaker.. plus xp needs 512 ram to be any use at all (it takes 200mb just to put up the desktop.. aston is lighter managing in about 90mb!!).. any less results in a crawl along crash every 2 minutes system..

The secret with linux (whatever flavour) on limited old hardware is KISS.. Install the core system then add ONLY the bits you need.. don't "default" install the whole hog.. so for ubuntu you need the "alternative" install disk version.. for servers and the like.. which allows a "component" install.

Im currently investigating http://hld.c64.org/poldi/lunix/lunix.html because my interest is in very limited and basic systems.. I started off on a pdp8 !!

[Mark Hennessy]

Yes, I know. That's why I recommended Lubuntu, which uses LXDE. It's lightweight, but perfectly usable. I'm thinking of reinstalling a couple of other systems using Lubuntu instead of Ubuntu for that reason - judging by how it performs on a 1GHz P3, it should be really nice on a 3.06GHz P4. Nearly as nice as XP

Haven't tried XFCE4 yet - I'll give it a whirl some time soon...

[ed731pdh]

I think I have a Linux disk in stock here, will have a look this evening to see what version it is.

[ed731pdh]

Interesting evening, Lubuntu just locked up during the installation phase. Still looking for another linux disk I know I have here but do you think I can find the blasted thing in amongst crates of computer bits and bobs..... nope.

Tomorrow is another day.

[Tedzed1]

You may be interested in this linux version.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/