[BozemanLUG] Older PC hardware and older distros . .

[David Eder]

You inspired me.  I pulled out a 700mhz celeron laptop with 192Mb ram and
a 10G hard drive.  I installed Fedora 14 on it.  It works fine.  I'm using
XFCE4 and the desktop environment.  I can even play flv movies with no
trouble with mplayer.  This should be perfect for entertaining the kids on
those 10 hour drives to Nebraska to visit the inlaws.

Note that the installer won't work.  I installed it in a VM on a larger
box and then tar'ed it up.  I created an ext3 partition and untar the
files there.  I installed grub and tweaked it until the kernel loaded.

I did something similar to create a bootable thumb drive.  The nice thing
about this thumb drive as oppose to the ones other people make is that
there is not compressed static image with a writeable overlay.  It's much
faster.

If anybody wants one of my bootable thumb images, I'll be at the next
meeting and we can copy it.

David.

> 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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