[BozemanLUG] Older PC hardware and older distros . .

[jjcogliati-208 at yahoo.com]

If you are willing to go farther afield but still want a current open source unix varient, you might consider Netbsd.  I've installed Netbsd 5.0 on a 486 with 16 MB of ram.  I couldn't find any Linux distro that still supported boot floppies (the 486 can't boot from a cdrom), but Netbsd does.     

Of course, that was more for entertainment value than as a practical project.  

Josh Cogliati

--- On Mon, 4/18/11, gary hildebrand <wa7kkp at gmail.com> wrote:

From: gary hildebrand <wa7kkp at gmail.com>
Subject: [BozemanLUG] Older PC hardware and older distros . .
To: "Bozeman LUG -- linux" <discuss at bozemanlug.org>
Date: Monday, April 18, 2011, 3:36 PM

I've aquired a 200MMX HP computer, and it works okay with (cough cough) WIN98, but I want more than that, of course.  I'm limited by the BIOS for max HD size at 8.4 Gb, which is barely enough for the new distros when you load everything.


I'm looking for 72pin SIMMS, 60ns EDO or FPM, to fill six slots to get the RAM up to or beyond 256 Mb.  I'm also looking for a source of SCSI drives that I can use (a work-around the BIOS - IDC drive limitation).  SCSI-3 preferred, but I'll settle for SCSI-2 if they're 9 Gb or so.

It won't be a screamer, but I can use it for my more mundane work.  I've got my laptop for SOTA computing, anyways.
If you know of anyone in the greater area, even Butte/Helena/Billings who might have some really old junk laying around, I could scrounge up the RAM, or an IDE hard drive that won't blow the BIOS limit.

Also, I'm trying to find older distros of Mandriva/Madrake 7.2 or so, and/or SuSE 7.x/8.x/9.x.  I know these will load and work just fine with legacy PC's.  I have a CD drive, but no DVD . . . yet.

Gary Hildebrand
wa7kkp <at> gmail <dot> com



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