Uncreative Labs

Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 62

I have an old Dell Optiplex GL5166, Pentium 200, 128MB RAM, 2GB HD, CD-ROM Floppy, NIC, Sound Card, and I would like to run a light linux distro on it for fun and experimentation with command line, networking, server, etc. I have been suggested to try Damn Small Linux, a knoppix derivative, however there is no way to create set up diskettes easily as this computer will not boot from the CD-ROM drive. I would like to find an outdated copy of Red Hat or something where I can use the RAWWRITE util to make a boot floppy. However, I am having problems finding a linux that old on the net. Are there any good linux distros out there that will run on my old hardware and (2) has boot floppy images I can boot from?

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

DSL has a boot floppy image (and I'd recommend it over any older Linux distro any day of the week, given the specs of your machine and the experimental nature of what you're attempting). Boot floppy image is here:

ftp://ftp.oss.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/bootfloppy.img

If you have trouble with RawWrite, I'd strongly recommend RawWrite for Windows (32):

http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite

Had a friend give me an AMD-K6 200 which had a bad P/S and no drives in it. Slapped a FDD, 4xDVD, 1Gig HDD and 96MB of RAM into it after fixing the P/S issue and it runs DSL (3.2) quite nicely (installed on HDD using LILO). RedHat 5.2 just wouldn't cut it on this machine....

Joined: 29 Mar 2008 Posts: 51 Location: czech republic

DSL is definitelly a good choice. Or if you have some knowledge already try OpenBSD. But without any knowledge of *nixes start with DSL.
At home I use OpenBSD as firewall, router, www, ftp and file server + some backround downloads from Rapidshare etc. The config is P1 at 133 MHz, 128MB RAM and 160GB HDD.

Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 62

T-R-A wrote:

DSL has a boot floppy image (and I'd recommend it over any older Linux distro any day of the week, given the specs of your machine and the experimental nature of what you're attempting). Boot floppy image is here:

ftp://ftp.oss.cc.gatech.edu/pub/linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/bootfloppy.img

If you have trouble with RawWrite, I'd strongly recommend RawWrite for Windows (32):

http://www.chrysocome.net/rawwrite

Had a friend give me an AMD-K6 200 which had a bad P/S and no drives in it. Slapped a FDD, 4xDVD, 1Gig HDD and 96MB of RAM into it after fixing the P/S issue and it runs DSL (3.2) quite nicely (installed on HDD using LILO). RedHat 5.2 just wouldn't cut it on this machine....

Thanks for the link but the bootdisk will not recognize the CD-ROM in the drive. Perhaps I have downloaded the wrong ISO image? The floppy keeps coming up a boot failure as it loads the linux kernel and restarts.

Joined: 29 Mar 2008 Posts: 51 Location: czech republic

You can also remove that HDD and install DSL on it in any other computer which boots from CDROM. Just be careful with setting of the bootloader. In linux does matter where the HDD is physically located on the controller. I mean Primary Master, Secondary Master etc.

Joined: 19 May 2008 Posts: 3

I had a P1 that would not boot from the cd
nor would the boot floppy recognize the cdrom.
I was able to install it on another machine,
then at the point where it would have rebooted...
I just popped the drive back in the original machine...
and it worked

Joined: 10 May 2008 Posts: 62

philo wrote:

I had a P1 that would not boot from the cd
nor would the boot floppy recognize the cdrom.
I was able to install it on another machine,
then at the point where it would have rebooted...
I just popped the drive back in the original machine...
and it worked

I just did the same thing and it worked. DSL had drivers for all my hardware devices, which was pretty cool, however the system was very slow even running JWM or Fluxbox window managers. The system is memory maxed at 128MB for the particular model, but the cpu is a 200Mhz Pentium i586. But the video was only 2MB S3 Trio64+.

Joined: 02 Oct 2004 Posts: 594 Location: Western NC

If you're running directly from the live distro on the CD, then yep, it's gonna be slow. Installing to HDD would be better, but try the cheatcode:

dsl toram

when starting (you have the required 128MB of RAM). That should improve performance dramatically. Other cheatcodes are here:

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Cheat_Codes