[KLUG Members] Cheap hardware

[Jamie McCarthy]

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mag00@voyager.net (magoo) writes:

> WMU Computer Equipment Auction Saturday July 26, 2003  10:00 A.M.

I went and picked up a few cheap things... a $3 box of cables
(mostly power cables), a $3 monochrome monitor, a $5 old Dell with
no hard drive, and a $25 "complete system."

The "complete system" was a Compaq computer, monitor, keyboard and
mouse... except it actually had no mouse.  And the paper on top of
it said it was a "Pentium II" system... except it was a Pentium.
Both of these facts I deduced from observation before I made my bid,
so I'm not upset, but next time they have one of these... buyer
beware.

The only thing I'm disappointed about is that my $5 Dell P-133 not
only lacks a hard drive, but whoever removed it also took the portion
of the case that it mounted in.  So I have no way to drop a new drive
in it except maybe string or duct tape.  Oh well.

So I've burned myself some CDs of new Linux distros to try out on my
$25 Compaq Prolinea 5120 (a Pentium 120).  I tried Gentoo first, and
started it installing on Saturday night.  Gentoo is a distro where
you compile all your tools from source code.  Did I mention this was
a Pentium 120?!  It was still compiling Monday morning when it
finally ran out of disk space! Which I expected, it said it needed
1.5 GB and it only had 1.2... but I was hoping I'd get away with it.
Sweet idea though.

Next I tried Morphix, which is based on Knoppix.  It boots up fine
and actually looks really sweet, but the video in this Compaq
doesn't seem very happy.  I think I'm at 640x480, but I don't know
the bit depth, and the video is fuzzy, glitchy, things on the right
side of the screen ghost, and the far right side is just gone.  I
don't know if that's busted video hardware, or if it's just being
asked to deliver better quality than it can handle.

(I have a couple of spare PCs lying around, none of which is a real
system... if the video on this Compaq really is busted, I'll just
cannibalize its HD and power supply and get one of the other
machines going...)

So, in my distro search... there's Debian, but Debian still (!)
doesn't include the tulip driver in the base install and insists I
actually insert a stupid floppy disk with that module on it. 
Amazing.

Next on my list is Knoppix itself... I'll give that a whirl later.

Anyone have any other suggestions for a distro that might run on
older hardware nicely?  Desired features include:

    * free and Free, ISO downloadable
    * installs on 1.2 GB drive, runs in 128 MB RAM
    * KDE would be nice
    * live-cd would be nice
      (boot from CD into a full Linux X environment and, if desired,
      install to hard drive from there)
    * easy (Debian-style?) package management
      (simple commands to install new packages, don't make me download
      RPMs separately, that's the package manager's job!)
    * simple, easy install procedure would be nice
      (if I have to type "mke2fs" you failed!)

If I can find such a distro I will hand this thing over to my niece
and nephew and tell them to go nuts :)
- -- 
  Jamie McCarthy
 http://mccarthy.vg/
  jamie@mccarthy.vg

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