Hi,
I'm interested in using gentoo to revitalize a old P3 600Mhz (128 MB RAM).
Have you got any tips how to set up my installation? Which version? Desktop environment (not KDE o Gnome, but some other ligther..)
Which set up maybe usefull to use the PC as desktop/server into a home network?
Thak you in advance for your help.
How to revitalize a P3 600Mhz
Message
I'd say your options are limited. This box could be a router and simple home web/file server. Serving static web contents. There is not much more it can do with only 128 MB. You could use it as a desktop, but it will be slow with some web sites and there is nothing you can do to make it faster. It would work pretty good if used as (diskless) GUI terminal, though.
- bobspencer123
- Guru
- Posts: 544
- Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2005 1:50 am
What is your goal?
If you feel it would be fun to try to make this box useful somehow but don't really care if you fail, then I'd say go ahead. I've done lots of those.
If you're trying to get a bit more use out of an antique because you can't stand to throw away working hardware, then I think you're in for a disappointment. No matter how good it gets, you're likely to fight it every time you use it.
FWIW I think this box would make a really slow router. Rather than setting it up to be indispensable to everything else on the network I would try for the lightweight client, and if that doesn't work then retire it. Face it, it's old hardware and there's a good chance it will die with the next power surge.
If you must go there, then try for blackbox window manager, or FVWM2. You won't be able to use firefox, but maybe start looking for a low-function web browser that doesn't depend on GTK, and preferably not Qt either.
I've had a functional Linux box with less resources than that, and at the time it was a pretty fast machine. The problem is that all of the software we use adapts to make good use of mainstream hardware, which means it uses more disk and more RAM. Linux is no different, although there are quite a few people who think that it's most suitable for old junk. My opinion goes in the opposite direction; if I'm going to invest the effort to get Gentoo working, I'm putting it on something new and fast.
Finding a Linux image from back when that box was new won't really work well either, the web pages you would go to have probably changed to use more recent libraries than will work with your browser.
If you feel it would be fun to try to make this box useful somehow but don't really care if you fail, then I'd say go ahead. I've done lots of those.
If you're trying to get a bit more use out of an antique because you can't stand to throw away working hardware, then I think you're in for a disappointment. No matter how good it gets, you're likely to fight it every time you use it.
FWIW I think this box would make a really slow router. Rather than setting it up to be indispensable to everything else on the network I would try for the lightweight client, and if that doesn't work then retire it. Face it, it's old hardware and there's a good chance it will die with the next power surge.
If you must go there, then try for blackbox window manager, or FVWM2. You won't be able to use firefox, but maybe start looking for a low-function web browser that doesn't depend on GTK, and preferably not Qt either.
I've had a functional Linux box with less resources than that, and at the time it was a pretty fast machine. The problem is that all of the software we use adapts to make good use of mainstream hardware, which means it uses more disk and more RAM. Linux is no different, although there are quite a few people who think that it's most suitable for old junk. My opinion goes in the opposite direction; if I'm going to invest the effort to get Gentoo working, I'm putting it on something new and fast.
Finding a Linux image from back when that box was new won't really work well either, the web pages you would go to have probably changed to use more recent libraries than will work with your browser.
- NeddySeagoon
- Administrator
- Posts: 56094
- Joined: Sat Jul 05, 2003 9:37 am
- Location: 56N 3W
fiore,
There are two separate issues here.
1. Using it
2. Building/Maintaining it.
With 128Mb RAM, it takes over 14 hours to build gcc because it spends most of the time swapping. Builds and updates will be painful, but you could build and update using another machine to address that.
In use, it will be fine for light internet use as long as you use a lightweight window manager. I have a 600MHz P3 laptop set up that way.
It could also be used as a firewall box. I have a 600MHz Celeron with Smoothwall for that purpose.
There are two separate issues here.
1. Using it
2. Building/Maintaining it.
With 128Mb RAM, it takes over 14 hours to build gcc because it spends most of the time swapping. Builds and updates will be painful, but you could build and update using another machine to address that.
In use, it will be fine for light internet use as long as you use a lightweight window manager. I have a 600MHz P3 laptop set up that way.
It could also be used as a firewall box. I have a 600MHz Celeron with Smoothwall for that purpose.
Regards,
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
NeddySeagoon
Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.
If you have to buy any hardware at all for this, especially if you want something that's actually useful, then maybe you should look at what home-use network storage costs. And for that matter a firewall appliance.
$75 USD gets you a firewall router that does most of what anyone realistically would need at home and is almost certainly much faster than anything you could put together with old hardware. There is a latency in any general purpose networking stack that is automatically slower than what they use on a dedicated switch or firewall of similar cost.
$140 USD gets you a terabyte of network storage with a gigabit network card and a bunch of extra support for backups and mac/windows/itunes/print server connectivity for your file server.
IMO if you're looking for practical solutions, by the time you figured out how to make it all work you've already spent more than the combined amount above just in your own time, and what you get with the appliance is smaller, quieter and infinitely less headache. Chances are you plug it in and configure it with a web browser, and most of the configuration is automatic. My firewall/router I basically set the password and everything else the default settings were what I wanted.
On the other hand, if you're doing this to learn how to set these things up on a restricted system, then by all means go ahead. I keep installing the same box over and over again just to learn more things, I can hardly fault anyone else for doing it.
I'm not trying to be the naysayer here, I'm just uncertain as to what your reasons are. For things like network appliances (file/print/whatever basic servers, routers, switches) I have long since stopped bothering with a do-it-yourself solution. I can't afford to mess with it.
If you're worried about software licensing, some of the network storage devices run Linux or FreeBSD. We had one at the office we bought a few years ago that was Linux-based. Didn't know till we got it there and I recognized the configuration screens as WebMin.
Good luck and have fun.
$75 USD gets you a firewall router that does most of what anyone realistically would need at home and is almost certainly much faster than anything you could put together with old hardware. There is a latency in any general purpose networking stack that is automatically slower than what they use on a dedicated switch or firewall of similar cost.
$140 USD gets you a terabyte of network storage with a gigabit network card and a bunch of extra support for backups and mac/windows/itunes/print server connectivity for your file server.
IMO if you're looking for practical solutions, by the time you figured out how to make it all work you've already spent more than the combined amount above just in your own time, and what you get with the appliance is smaller, quieter and infinitely less headache. Chances are you plug it in and configure it with a web browser, and most of the configuration is automatic. My firewall/router I basically set the password and everything else the default settings were what I wanted.
On the other hand, if you're doing this to learn how to set these things up on a restricted system, then by all means go ahead. I keep installing the same box over and over again just to learn more things, I can hardly fault anyone else for doing it.
I'm not trying to be the naysayer here, I'm just uncertain as to what your reasons are. For things like network appliances (file/print/whatever basic servers, routers, switches) I have long since stopped bothering with a do-it-yourself solution. I can't afford to mess with it.
If you're worried about software licensing, some of the network storage devices run Linux or FreeBSD. We had one at the office we bought a few years ago that was Linux-based. Didn't know till we got it there and I recognized the configuration screens as WebMin.
Good luck and have fun.
Add some more memory and try Funtoo?
I have an old 800MHz Pentium III box still in use, running (very old) Gentoo, for web browsing and running OpenOffice (binary download). (Actually, I don't use it, my wife does, and doesn't want to move to my up-to-date box.) Until about 3 years ago, I updated its Gentoo monthly, so it was fast enough to keep up to date. It does have 500 Mb RAM though and an 80 Gb disk (though it ran happily with 20 Gb until I started editing video). If you can't add memory, use two hard drives, one dedicated to swap.
I'd guess a 300 MHz machine would be pretty painful to update - building KDE would probably take a week. How about using Funtoo? I think you can get a binary download for x86 from there that would let you build a usable custom machine.
I'd guess a 300 MHz machine would be pretty painful to update - building KDE would probably take a week. How about using Funtoo? I think you can get a binary download for x86 from there that would let you build a usable custom machine.
Greybeard
- iss
- Tux's lil' helper
- Posts: 134
- Joined: Mon Oct 30, 2006 8:36 am
- Location: Poland/Bydgoszcz
- Contact:
I have P3 600MHz with 384 MB RAM. Now it works as webserver (with PHP + MySQL) and network storage. It worked well as router/firewall and BitTorrent client too, but I don't need that now. I'm quite happy with it.
I never tried to run it as desktop.
GCC 4.4.x compiles in a bit less then 14 hours but it's with tests.
(On Celeron 900 MHz and 1280 MB RAM it's less than 4 hours without the tests)
You should look for a RAM upgrade.
I never tried to run it as desktop.
GCC 4.4.x compiles in a bit less then 14 hours but it's with tests.
(On Celeron 900 MHz and 1280 MB RAM it's less than 4 hours without the tests)
You should look for a RAM upgrade.
- NeddySeagoon
- Administrator
- Posts: 56094
- Joined: Sat Jul 05, 2003 9:37 am
- Location: 56N 3W
Network storage:
In the context I used it, basically a hard disk with an ethernet card attached, that is a file server for Mac, Windows, etc. Every one of them I've seen recently also has a bunch of extra features.
http://www.frys.com/product/5838553?sit ... IN_RSLT_PG
Also can mean a whole lot more. Business-oriented NAS (network attached storage) or SAN (Storage-area network) can be tens of thousands of dollars, and can literally replace the hard drive in the local computer, and can use fiberchannel or similar.
You said file server. I pointed out what I would use as a file server if I were doing it at home. You can search on home network storage and see what's out there, that link above is just the cheapest item on the first page of the first place I looked.
IMO one of these things and a firewall router would cover everything you're asking for in this thread, except the web browsing. I'm guessing that you already have a computer for everyone to use, so that's probably just an extra complication to take up a lot of space you probably don't really have, to do something you probably won't ever need to do.
The last 2 or 3 boxes I made to be "home servers" were never touched after they were installed, and 2 of them were extremely expensive in terms of time spent installing them. I gave up on it when I realized that. Now I just make a virtual machine and then I can copy it over with the rest of my stuff when I upgrade, and any time I need something which can't be part of my workstation I check out appliances first.
In the context I used it, basically a hard disk with an ethernet card attached, that is a file server for Mac, Windows, etc. Every one of them I've seen recently also has a bunch of extra features.
http://www.frys.com/product/5838553?sit ... IN_RSLT_PG
Also can mean a whole lot more. Business-oriented NAS (network attached storage) or SAN (Storage-area network) can be tens of thousands of dollars, and can literally replace the hard drive in the local computer, and can use fiberchannel or similar.
You said file server. I pointed out what I would use as a file server if I were doing it at home. You can search on home network storage and see what's out there, that link above is just the cheapest item on the first page of the first place I looked.
IMO one of these things and a firewall router would cover everything you're asking for in this thread, except the web browsing. I'm guessing that you already have a computer for everyone to use, so that's probably just an extra complication to take up a lot of space you probably don't really have, to do something you probably won't ever need to do.
The last 2 or 3 boxes I made to be "home servers" were never touched after they were installed, and 2 of them were extremely expensive in terms of time spent installing them. I gave up on it when I realized that. Now I just make a virtual machine and then I can copy it over with the rest of my stuff when I upgrade, and any time I need something which can't be part of my workstation I check out appliances first.
Pardon the double-post.
I guess the most compelling reason to use an appliance is that when you get one, you don't have to monkey with anything to get it to work. It's designed to connect to just about anything that you have, and anything your friends might bring over, or anything their friends might bring over. Plug and play, it mostly just works. Get some velcro and stick it to the side of your printer, hook the printer's USB up to that and the ethernet card to your switch.
And it's new, and fast, and tiny, and doesn't take up a whole desk slot. And it's already set up for a whole lot of things that you might think are cool but hadn't thought of.
So again your primary motivation comes into play. Are you looking for a file server, or are you looking for something to do with an antique computer that you can't bring yourself to throw away?
If you want a file server, then go get an appliance, it will be over in an evening and you'll be off doing something cool with your main Gentoo box, your wife and kids will be hooking up their macs and ipods and sharing the printer.
If you want a project, then clean off your old box and start installing. Nobody here is going to judge you for that, especially not me.
I guess the most compelling reason to use an appliance is that when you get one, you don't have to monkey with anything to get it to work. It's designed to connect to just about anything that you have, and anything your friends might bring over, or anything their friends might bring over. Plug and play, it mostly just works. Get some velcro and stick it to the side of your printer, hook the printer's USB up to that and the ethernet card to your switch.
And it's new, and fast, and tiny, and doesn't take up a whole desk slot. And it's already set up for a whole lot of things that you might think are cool but hadn't thought of.
So again your primary motivation comes into play. Are you looking for a file server, or are you looking for something to do with an antique computer that you can't bring yourself to throw away?
If you want a file server, then go get an appliance, it will be over in an evening and you'll be off doing something cool with your main Gentoo box, your wife and kids will be hooking up their macs and ipods and sharing the printer.
If you want a project, then clean off your old box and start installing. Nobody here is going to judge you for that, especially not me.
I had a box like that running until recently that I used as a desktop using lxde and mainly for browsing using firefox. It worked pretty decent If you can stand waiting 10 seconds fro firefox to start up. (Once started it was definitely not annoyingly slow). Other 'standard' destop task were no problem either. Playing video was a bit of a problem (still OK using xv, not gl), but probably more to do with the video card.
Of course video encoding was too far reached. generally: think of what you could do with Win98 at the time on that kind of boxes: you can do at least with linux today.
P.S. The box was at the same time running as router and firewall.
Of course video encoding was too far reached. generally: think of what you could do with Win98 at the time on that kind of boxes: you can do at least with linux today.
P.S. The box was at the same time running as router and firewall.
That is a very loaded question.Satoshi wrote:I know this is not the place to ask, but wouldn't a shared folder in a PC be the same as NAS, performance-wise?
If you're talking about a shared folder on the machine being described here, then there's just about nothing that could be slower. Using it in conjunction with modern home hardware will inevitably slow everyone down, not least of which being that most home hardware has a gigabit ethernet card and/or wireless N. A couple years back, simply hooking that up to a network caused the entire network to slow down to match the slowest component. Thank God for switches! And frankly I've been suspicions of some older so-called switches too, I suspect they were re-badged hubs.
NAS can be an architecture optimized for file sharing, and if you're dealing with something for a medium or large business then you're dealing with a lot of money aimed at really good throughput, hooked up to gigabit networking and possibly able to saturate the network interface.
Likewise, SAN in an enterprise setting generally uses an optical interface and can have throughputs which are similar to or larger than the disk interface in your computer (SATA, etc), and often the system boots from that. You get centralized management of storage, on-the-fly changes to partition sizes, easy backups and lots of other neat things.
If you have all-new equipment you can get a lot of performance for not much money. If you have new gear and an old switch/cable modem/wireless hub, then upgrading it can cause a significant boost to your whole network. I know this from experience, I used an old cable modem with my current network and never got anywhere near the performance they advertised. After I upgraded the modem I was getting burst speeds over their specs.
- darkstarbyte
- Tux's lil' helper
- Posts: 120
- Joined: Mon Aug 23, 2010 11:05 pm
This thread might be dead but I would have suggested for a machine that slow, lxde. Its small runs on 256 megs of ram on linux mint but then again if you customize it, it should go a lot faster.
You know you're a geek when...
you're whiling away some time in the computer department at your local store, spot a dialog box on the one of the laptops that calmly announces"Mcfee. Your computer is at risk",and totally get the unintended humor.
you're whiling away some time in the computer department at your local store, spot a dialog box on the one of the laptops that calmly announces"Mcfee. Your computer is at risk",and totally get the unintended humor.
- DaggyStyle
- Watchman
- Posts: 5969
- Joined: Wed Mar 22, 2006 6:57 am
that machine has 128mb of ram, he'll need to cut down by half at least.darkstarbyte wrote:This thread might be dead but I would have suggested for a machine that slow, lxde. Its small runs on 256 megs of ram on linux mint but then again if you customize it, it should go a lot faster.
best idea it to either get more mem or use openbox
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the former - Albert Einstein
- darkstarbyte
- Tux's lil' helper
- Posts: 120
- Joined: Mon Aug 23, 2010 11:05 pm
If this this guy lived next to me I would give him 2 sticks of sdram(256 Megs each.). Free. I got a hold of many pentium threes for free and got a hold of there ram when they were not working.
You know you're a geek when...
you're whiling away some time in the computer department at your local store, spot a dialog box on the one of the laptops that calmly announces"Mcfee. Your computer is at risk",and totally get the unintended humor.
you're whiling away some time in the computer department at your local store, spot a dialog box on the one of the laptops that calmly announces"Mcfee. Your computer is at risk",and totally get the unintended humor.
- darkstarbyte
- Tux's lil' helper
- Posts: 120
- Joined: Mon Aug 23, 2010 11:05 pm
Ok I know a way to solve this guys problem as I have found out. I stripped down kernel 2.6.36-r3 so much that I am running firefox, lxde, and noscript. (Java seems to take a heavy toll on the ram.)[/bug]
EDIT:
All under 128 megs of ram so with flux box or the icewm you should be able to run that thing just fine. One more thing if you want to be able to run your machine really fast under load there is a python script, kernel patch, or shell script that will help a lot.
EDIT:
All under 128 megs of ram so with flux box or the icewm you should be able to run that thing just fine. One more thing if you want to be able to run your machine really fast under load there is a python script, kernel patch, or shell script that will help a lot.
You know you're a geek when...
you're whiling away some time in the computer department at your local store, spot a dialog box on the one of the laptops that calmly announces"Mcfee. Your computer is at risk",and totally get the unintended humor.
you're whiling away some time in the computer department at your local store, spot a dialog box on the one of the laptops that calmly announces"Mcfee. Your computer is at risk",and totally get the unintended humor.