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Old August 28th, 2007, 03:56 PM

Baron Munchausen Baron Munchausen is offline
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Default Re: OT - which distro?

Oh, it's definitely a homebrew. I replaced the contents of an old 386 "baby AT" case with parts that I bought on eBay. It's an Asus T2P4 motherboard, one of the most highly regarded boards of that generation. The level 2 cache was still on the motherboard at that time, and normally a Pentium MMX 233 would be the fastest CPU for this board. BUT... AMD produced the compatible K6-2 series with a special multiplier so you could get 6X with the 2X jumper settings. This gives me what is essentially a Pentium II system at 400 Mhz, but still with only 256 MB of ordinary DRAM (only the level 2 cache is SDRAM). Thanks to the long-unchanged standard for IDE it's got a relatively modern 15 Gb HD attached. And a Matrox G200 video card which is quite fast at 2D display just waaaay behind the 3D revolution. Currently I've got Fedora 6 running XFCE on it, which is serviceable but often slow. Unfortunately, Fedora 7 is not available on CD anymore, only DVD. I'm not buying a DVD drive for this ancient system, even if it might work. So I'm thinking about what other distros to use to keep it relatively up-to-date. Xubuntu sounds like a good candidate but the full CD image is a bit much to download -- it'll have to be mailorder for that. I also downloaded Puppy Linux 2.17.1 via bittorrent (only 100 MB) and plan to try it out soon.
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