Compaq Deskpro

[Nick Billingham]

Has anyone any experience of installing Mandrake on a Compaq Deskpro 4000. It may be a rather weedy machine, p133 with a couple of 500mb drives and only 32mb ram. But I have 2 of the things and don't want to bin them.

Am I flogging a dead horse with this? I got so many error messages after the 1st install that I am having to fdisk the lot and start again.

Hopefully I can get my domestic network up and running again.

Cheers, Nick Billingham

[TonyH]

Hi Nick, I put mandrake 8.2 on a Deskpro 2000 with a 166pent proc...a very minimal install that is, but I have 2 drives both are 1.2GB, im not using it now, just to see if i could do it. Dont remember what the size was of it but it mostly filled a 1.2drive and used the other one for a storage place. If you were careful and used the xpert install thing, picking packages u only need, and expert option of formatting the disks u have -dont see why you couldnt use yours to do the same. This is last years mandrake and I think it even put the "HOME" dir on the 2nd drive for me (but you can prob move it there and edit your fstab to mount both drives at boot.) Good luck TonyH

[Nick Billingham]

I think I can definitely say that it is a waste of time trying a full graphical installation of mandrake on a Compaq Deskpro if it only has 32M of ram.... the rescue option hasn't enough space to load.

It does work with 80M ram and 1.2gig of hard drive, but with very limited applications. I suspect that if one was to reduce the "Home" partion from the default proportion one could get better functionality, but at the expense of useable data storage.

Anyway, now I've got to learn how to use Linux, it seems straightforward enough so far. Apart from the cd..... it won't give me the bloody disk back!

Nick

[TonyH]

Yep you gotta unmount the cd drive to get ur disk out . Not sure if u mean u already got linux installed someplace and cant get the disk loose....type 'umount /dev/cdrom' in a terminal ,should do it
tony h

[2damncommon]

Vector installed as is, Debian or Slack minimal then add would do the trick.

[williamwbishop]

I would suggest slackware for the box, or you can use another distro and use a lightweight X, like ice or something. I run it at work on a 133 deskpro 2000 with 48 meg of memory. It's running slack with ice and it runs perfectly well. I rarely go X with it though, as I use it as a terminal for other boxes.

[Nick Billingham]

Many thanks to you all for the ideas. As the rather RAM challenged machine is going to be used by my 12 yr old daughter, I think the X bit is going to be a must, I imagine I can get around a lot of the other problems by using the network.

which distro would be best to fit into the small (400mb) hd that will still run the GUI. Where is a good site to download it from in the UK.

I get the feeling that my daughter had better learn to use Linux soon as I hear it is being adopted by several schools. Let's face it the cost of Windows to a large school network must be astronomic. My little monsters school needs windows, but only because the little darlings have chucked bricks through them!

Just a thought, has anyone used a Linux database for the compilation of historical data? I've used Access up til now but would be interested to know of anyone with similar experience.

Thanks again, Nick

[TonyH]

Nick i forgot the actual URL, but do a search for distrowatch.com or .org, they list most of the linux distros with links to d/l them. also u can do a search for small linux distros on google. Theres some that will run from a cd rom drive , u dont even have to install it. Good luck
Tony H

[2damncommon]

I would guess Vector would be your best choice.
If your PC has a CD it should load OK. May run out of room if you attempt to install from file on the hard disk.
www.vectorlinux.org
Anything else would be build it yourself to some extent.