Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [ Black Dragon ] on Friday 31 March 2006 01:18 \__
>> Last weekend I took a Knoppix v4.0.2 (CD) for a spin for the first time
>> on an old Compaq Presario 550Mhz / Celeron and wasn't surprised everything
>> worked. Even the onboard Ensonic sound which since day one we've always
>> had a hell of a time with using Windows after abandoning the custom restore
>> disks (Windows 98) that originally came with the computer. The speed at
>> which everything worked was so painfully slow though that as far as I'm
>> concerned it was useless. Needless to say, that computer is going to be
>> reduced to router/firewall/server duty with OpenBSD since it's worthless
>> as a desktop now.
> I had a Compaq Presario which ran Windows 98. I couldn't quite get Ubuntu
> installed on it as it ran out of memory before installation began. It only
> had 32 MB of RAM, I ought to add. BD, do you reckon that OpenBSD will cope
> with that amount of memory? 400Mhz AMD chip?
Sure, any of the open source Unix OSes will run on that machine provided
X isn't installed. Heck, my FreeBSD machine serving a 5 computer home
lan (firewall/gateway (ipfw/natd), Samba, Apache, BIND, Sendmail, Squid,
INN, dhcpd, ftpd, SSH, et cetera) is a 300Mhz PII with 512MB ram and it
usually has next to no load on it. I don't see why any Linux distro with
a sane default install wouldn't run well on your Compaq.
>> This weekend I'll be booting that Knoppix disk just for kicks on a brand
>> new system built solely for gaming. The system is now running Windows XP 64
>> bit trial, and it works flawlessly. I have no doubt that when the trial
>> times out I'll be happy to purchase the OS. The MSI (K8N Diamond Plus) mobo
>> is based on the Nvidia nForce4 chipset and is loaded with all the spiffy
>> goodies gamers (my son in this case) need. I'd be mighty impressed if the
>> SLI (dual Geforce 7900 GT GPUs in 16x PCIe slots) graphics worked from the
>> get-go. Same if it recognizes either of the on board SATA RAID controllers.
>> If I'm happy with what I see I'll likely go buy some more hard disks and a
>> boxed SuSE distro and attempt to take a full install for a ride.
>> Unless somebody has a better suggestion about Linux distros' for cutting
>> edge hardware that is.
> SuSE would probably be perfect. As long as you needn't *chokes* pay for it as
> a corporate client.
Cool. Now that my son has been hearing good things about Linux and gaming,
that is, that some of the games he plays Linux versions out-perform the
Windows versions, my own interest in Linux is slowly being revived. :-)
--
Black Dragon
Cocaine is nature's way of telling you you have too much money.
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