Linux on an old pc

[colecifer]

I've got a Pentium 1 system lieing around with a 4 gig hard drive and 32 megabytes of ram. I was having trouble thinking of what to use it for and decided to use it to learn linux. i've got a couple of questions. first how important are drivers in linux? will it still run fine if i don't have drivers, i don't think they will be easy to find as i'm not even sure what is in this pc. I tried to fire up knopix to see if it would work but of course it doesn't suppourt bootable cd's. so i tried using a 98 bootdisk and starting with CD rom suppourt. But then i couldn't figure out how to launch it from there. What are some of your suggestions? i'm still thinking about which flavor of nix to go with but right now i'm trying to figure out how to get it running first.

[bailey]

it will run linux just fine, just make sure that you match the distro with the cpu your useing.

I have a old compaq with a 1.8 gig drive and red hat ver, 7.2 will not fit on the drive in a full install, I had to leave out some services/damons out, but it runs great otherwise.

you will have to run a older version too.

RH ver 9.0 takes over 5 gig of drive space for a full install on a p4 system.

[colecifer]

for a pentium 1 would i want I386, i586, i686, alpha, sparc, or ppc?

[bigandy]

Check out LinuxISO (www.linuxiso.org). I'm not sure what they have in the way of older distros, but its worth a look.

[Karnevil9]

You should be able to get by with the i386 systems. With many Linux systems that have more than one CD, the first CD is the only one you need to get a bootable system. The other CD's are to install the extras. You can also check edmunds enterprises.com for Linux CD's.

[Floppyman]

I think just about any flavor of linux will run fine on that system. I think what will slow you down is the GUI (KDE/GNOME etc.). I did Slackware 9.1 (2.4.22 kernel) install on PII 233 w/32mb ram and 2 gig hdd's. It was a barebones install (no GUI, etc.) and the kernel booted in under 30 seconds. HTH

[Xayd]

Originally posted by colecifer
for a pentium 1 would i want I386, i586, i686, alpha, sparc, or ppc?

i386 = everything going back to the 386 CPU up thru the P4/Athlons. Not optimized for new instructions but it will work on any/everything that came from Intel or AMD.

i586 = some optimizations for Pentium 2s.

i686 = some optimizations for P3/P4.

Alpha = an Alpha CPU, if you don't know what it is you don't have it ;).

Sparc = Sun Microsystems, again you don't have it.

PPC = Apple/Macintosh, you obviously don't have that either.

[colecifer]

thanks for all your help, i don't have any blank cd's right now so i haven't been able to mess around with this yet. Hopefully i can make a run out to bestbuy or something this weekend.

[LocoCoyote]

Xayd.....check your numbers.

i586 is the Pentium CPU class (386, 486 etc....)
your enhancements for the Pentium II start with the i686