Pentium III and Linux distro?

[Hagar]

I have been given a pentium III computer 550 katmai CPU, I am upgrading it to Coppermine 1.0GHz (£4.99) as it is an apollo 133A chipset and also adding 1.5Gb SDRAM (£7.50). I intend to add my 250Gb IDE drive to what else is already there and run Linux. It has a 2x AGP Rage graphics card and an antique Voodoo 2 3dfx card.

Any thoughts on a good distro for this? I do not want to run windows at all.

 

[Hagar]

OP Resist this hypocrisy.... Get yourself a hardware accelerated Nvidia GPU and you'll be laughing on linux

Funnily enough it does have 2000 on (not for long). Yes, this is Linux all the way. I did use Linux a few years ago probably on a later machine than this, but the spec 1Ghz, 1.5Gb etc. sounded reasonable and I shall look out for a GPU.

I have a Radeon 7000 32Mb PCI or the aforementioned AGP card just to get up and running. This is a budget box and am aiming to come in at about £50-60 so any thoughts on a specific model for ~£50 or less would be good. Geforce 6 or poss 7.

 

[Hagar]

Overall if you're going to shell out 50quid for a graphics card why not instead dump the platform and buy an ION-ITX .... seen some go pretty cheap on MM

No I am not going to shell out hugely for GFX card. Could just dump it but I have spent £12.50 on it (last of the big spenders heh). Anyway I like playing around with different stuff and I do not really need another computer

Will look out for a super cheapo 8400GS, may take a short while, thanks to all for advice on this thread,

andy.

 

[Hagar]

Just an update, the motherboard is a chaintech CT-6ATA4 and it had a P3 Katmai 550MHz processor and 128Mb PC100 SDRAM. I was a bit unsure having read that the CPU limit was 750MHz and the ram limit 768Mb.

However. I put the 1GHz Coppermine in and set the bios to 7.5x 133 rebooted fine. Good I thought. Filled the three slots with 512Mb PC133 each and rebooted fine. Excellent I thought. Put a 250Gb HDD in and it hit a limit of 136Gb. OK I thought.

So hardware wise 2 out of 3 so far, I will see where Linux takes me next. Or get a PCI card with SATA ports and rely on the card bios.

Also the AGP is 4x, this may take an 8x card we will see.

The machine is definitely speedier and may take a modest OC. Not a bad winter weekend project.

andy.

 

[Hagar]

Yes and no - an older BIOS without 48-bit logical block addressing will only see up to 128/137GB (depending on how you calculate it), but IIRC Linux ignores the BIOS for this purpose and addresses the hardware directly, so it should be able to see the full capacity without any need for BIOS support.

Yes it does, 250 (232) Gb seen by Linux.