I doubt you'll be able to boot from an external CD-ROM on either of those computers (this is regardless of OS). Also, I seriously doubt either of them has USB 2.0 ports. Almost certainly, they're plain USB ports, which are excrutiatingly slow for any sort of external drives.

You'll have to either use an internal CD-ROM drive or learn how to do one of the more complicated methods of installing (my favorite is PXE floppy, but figuring out how to set this up is not for the fainthearted).

Note that it's not necessary to actually close the computer case. It's okay to leave the case open, and jury-rig a CD-ROM off to the side stacked on top of some books so the cables will reach.

I have a bunch of P2 333's and they work great as ubuntu thin clients using LTSP.

[SIZE="2"]How can I set up linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP )
Do you know a step by step format.
I understand several communities worldwide are able to do this in india ,brazil & a library in connecticut(usa) just to name a few. This sounds real good to set up ubuntu,fedora & debian etc on pentium 2 & 3 with 32mb,64mb,128mb,192mb,264mb etc. [/SIZE]

You need to set up one static interface where you will attach the thin clients, install two packages and run one command.

sudo apt-get install ltsp-server-standalone openssh-server thin-client-manager-gnome

Now create your LTSP environment on the server with: (Takes about 45min@55kbps, 100MB dowload)

sudo ltsp-build-client

Edit the /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf file to set the IP values :

gksudo "gedit /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf"

Make sure the lines for domain-name-servers and routers match your network setup if you want to give the thin clients Internet access and restart the dhcp server with:

sudo /etc/init.d/dhcp3-server restart

then do

sudo ltsp-update-sshkeys

to make the ssh server aware of the change.
After that, you will be able to boot your first thin client.

Maintenance

If the thin clients seem to be having trouble, remove the whole thin client setup with

sudo rm -rf /opt/ltsp/*

and the install it again with

sudo ltsp-build-client

Use this if the above doesn't work http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=195956

Thin client configuration
Fine-tuning thin client configuration, more details and options here http://doc.ubuntu.com/edubuntu/handb...sp-client.html
Usually, thin clients on an ubuntu thin client network should work fine out of the box. Occasionally, you would want to fine-tune settings on a client, or alter the settings slightly, either to increase performance, compatibility, or to enable or disable certain features.
Thin client configuration settings are stored in a file called "lts.conf". It has a strange location, since it has to be accessable to the clients while they boot up. This file is located at "/opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf". Edit it with:

gksudo "gedit /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/lts.conf"

Making the LTSP boot floppys for the thin clients

Step 1
First identify what network interface card you have in your system.
This can easily be done by booting an Ubuntu live cd on the client and running in a terminal. (low memory machines will need to either open the case and read the chip details on the nic, or try to pause the boot display (use the pause key) and read what the pci device ids are for your network card)

lspci | grep Ethernet

I get the following output from various system I have:

user@host:~$ lspci | grep Ethernet
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6102 [Rhine-II] (rev 7c)

Your output will look similar.

If you want to use a floppy to boot your clients continue, to boot from the hdd or a cdrom, go to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ub...entsWithoutPxe

Step 2
Now we need to go to http://www.rom-o-matic.net/5.4.1/ to generate a boot image for the network interface.
For a boot floppy disk image select .zdsk, (To make a boot floppy)

You will now need to select the correct network driver. i.e.:
for Realtek 8139 = rtl8139: rtl8139

Next select configure.
Make sure PXELOADER_KEEP_ALL is ticked, and it is a good idea to also tick POWERSAVE, ALLMULTI, MULTICAST_LEVEL1, MULTICAST_LEVEL2, and DOWNLOAD_PROTO_TFTM

When done, click get rom.

The .zdsk file is a raw floppy image - on Linux you can copy it to a floppy like this:

cat eb-5.4.2-****.zdsk > /dev/fd0

Note that you need to install the ltsp server on a faster computer; preferably one with plenty of RAM. If the only computer you have available to install Linux on is this 333Mhz P2, then ltsp won't be helpful to you.

I use a diskless 300Mhz P2 as a dumb X terminal. I didn't use ltsp to do it; I did it the "manual" way. Using an old AGP Ati Rage128 videocard, I get wonderfully fast responsiveness even at 2048x1536 resolution. It's blazing fast, thanks to the 1.8Ghz server. In contrast, I also have a 120Mhz Pentium system set up as a dumb X terminal. With the same 1.8Ghz server, the graphics are laggy and it feels somewhat sluggish.

For machines that old I would always recommend something like Damn Small Linux or Puppy. I am actually quite a big fan of Puppy and most always recommend it for these circumstances.

This would be fine if those old machines had CDROM drives, but it was not uncommon for machines that old to not even have CDROM drives. If you're unlucky to have a system like that, you are SOL with these two Linux distributions.

Some older BIOses from 2000 and earlier just won't boot Slack 11 Disk 1. Pat V did something when creating the image that the older BIOSes don't like. Some work, most don't. There isn't much difference between 10.2 and 11.0 anyway other than a newer version of KDE. Don't know about Slack 12.0 since it was just released today.

Also, I've had problems installing any distro with a 2.6 kernel on these older machines. Not a GUI-installer issue because I couldn't install Debian Etch in text mode either. I tried Debian Etch, Fedora 5, Ubuntu 6.10, and PCLinuxOS and all would lock up 5 minutes into the install, although the latter two would boot and run as live CDs.

DSL or Slackware 10.2 are my recommendations for hardware as old as yours. Use something light as a WM such as Fluxbox, FVWM, or WindowMaker. XFCE should work OK if you have the RAM. I don't recommend using KDE unless you have a 600 MHz or faster processor.

Hello,

I could also not install Kubuntu 7.04 on my old Pentium 2-400, until I found out that the Alternate CD is much better for installing on old limited hardware. It is only 1 CD to install the base system and with "add/remove programs" from the menu you can extend/shrink your installed system.

Booting the installed system takes some minutes but once booted the system runs with acceptable speed.

I have also an old P2-300 laptop with 256 MB ram running Kubuntu 7.04 and networked with a pcmcia-2 wireless 54G network card. This one is slower in booting as well as operation but for simple work it is oke.

Regards, Frans

First, let me say I've been using WinXP on my P2-450 with 192MB RAM since 2002. My computer runs very quickly. It runs all the applications and games that I use. I don't see wasting money buying a new system when I have no need to.

Over the years, I've begun using FireFox, FoxIt, OpenOffice and tons of other programs and straying away from the "pay" software. It lead me to discovering the world of Linux. Many people I have talked to say its great for older systems.

Now the problem. Every version I've gotten a hold of... which is everything talked about in this topic hasn't worked. The weirdest part is, I can load up any of the "live" CDs and they work fine, but are very slow... almost painfully slow. But, none of them will install at all?

Why does WinXP run so nicely and quick, but just draging a window in Linux take 30 to 60 seconds to move? And why won't anything install? Everything starts the install but locks up the computer some where along the install process. Yes it locked up, I've let it sit for over 24 hours on trying to install Ubuntu just to make sure it wasn't really slow.

Please help!

have you tried installing ubuntu from the alternate install cd? or have you tried xubuntu?

This REALLY belongs in a new thread. Anyway, the most common culprit for a computer that old is a flakey CD drive and/or burner. I have a lot of old optical drives and only a couple of them can reliably install linux. It's also possible that there's bad RAM.

Start a new thread, and provide some more details about what sort of computer hardware you're talking about. In particular, laptops tend to have more issues than desktop computers.

as my previous post here is my system:No Name brand case,PC100 motherboard, 400MHz celeron and Nvidia 64mb GForce2 mx200 video card and 40 gig HDD with 448MB ram,PC133 ram. As suggested before it may be the cdrom drive, its the only thing I changed in the PC, to a 52X standard drive. Kubuntu runs fine and it fairly speedy for a 9 year old computer.

Go for Puppy. If it won't boot from cd you can use Grub or a Wakepup floppy disk to boot from cd, or from a "frugal" aka "type 1" hard drive install, which runs much like off the cd. You just have to put a few files from the cd onto the hard drive.
http://puppylinux.com/hard-puppy.htm

If you really want it to look pretty, you can always install a new window manager.

you can install Mandrake 9.0 and Red Hat 8,Lycoris or Ubuntu 5