Are you still running Mandrake 8.00 ? (ooold!)
I bet you would feel much more motivated if you used a modern distro (almost any distro will do, provided that you don't run KDE or Gnome, and even with those some have reported successes in this thread)

Well sa3,
I just installed debian sarge on my 166 with 32 megs. I'm not running any x at the moment because I dont have a mouse for it, but it works! Im posting with it right now using lynx.

If you have a question of your own, its always a good idea to start your own thread. It has two benefits. 1: you don't "hijack" someone else's thread. Thus you don't diminish their topic. 2: it sets your issue in its own "frame", which means you'll get more exposure, and likely an answer to your question.

Sa3atsky, did you get my email, or is your ISP blocking gmail?

Yes, still 8.0. Concerned that if I update it won't fit or run right. I can run KDE or Gnome on it, but I have a chicken and egg problem with upgrading. This is my only functioning computer, and I'm chicken to muck with it and accidentally cut my umbilical cord to the world. That's the second reason I've been thinking of buying a new machine. But that has lead me in circles as I try to figure out what to buy to be sure that Linux can run on it, and all the bells and whistles work (why not?).

Want something inexpensive for now, but with a viable upgrade path. Looked at ibexpc.com they have some inexpensive machines they say are for Linux with AMD Sempron, or Athlon 64. Want to keep my current oldie for backup and to learn to put together network or turn into a fax machine that doesn't print fax spam or something useful...

Haven't found a linux HCL that will tell me what cheap machines I could buy off the shelf at a big box store and expect to make it work.

Thanks Vectordrake and all, will start new thread.

In the USA, try these Sub300, Walmart, Northgate...
In the UK, TinyComputers...
There are bound to be a few around in Europe,
none in the antipodes unfortunately

Walmart sells cheap machines with Linspire. Maybe you don't want Linspire, but almost any other distro should run on them. However Linspire 5.0 (should be out any time now) could be a surprisingly good choice.

It's running 32 meg, eventually, I'll get more...

Have you been successful in gettting a linux distro to run? If not, check out:

http://damnsmalllinux.org/486.html

I haven't had any success as of yet either ... I've got to get beyond an "EIP" error and being green with linux.

This is great!, I finally had time to plug in my camara (actually put flash memory in a PNY Smartmedia USB card reader -- cheaper than accidentally destroying my camara ) The system saw it immediately and loaded the usb-storage driver. My only problem was that I wasn't sure how to actually mount and read it, but the tutorial on usb flash memory cards in the Hardware Tutorials on the site gave me enough info to figure out that I only needed to:
mkdir /mnt/camedia
mount -r -t vfat /dev/sdb1 /mnt/camedia

I also put an entry in the fstab so next time I should only need mount /mnt/camedia

Thanks again!

Hi all TP users out here !!

I've got this old machine too but I have a weird pb with X and virtual consoles ..

- Hardware : TP 365XD RAM 72 Mb/HD 1 Gb + I have a recent machine for doing all needed compilations ..

Steps :
- I installed Woody .. no pb at all ..
- I then upgraded to a 2.6.x kernel and installed XFree ..
- The trident graphic card is recognized at 800x600 (more on that later)

First pb : I tried to launch firefox but I obtain ideographic signs !! Normally the trident is with 1 Mb VRAM so why can't I have a few colors and why the bad charset ??

Second pb (the most annoying) : when I wanted to go back to a console (Fn), it is no more readable, the screen is garbled as if I did a cat on some binary !! Nothing would change it -> I must reboot (by sending the command blindly !!!)

Can you tell me :
1- if you have ever tried to upgrade to a 2.6.x kernel ?

2- if you have a win manager working well on this machine, can you post here your software combinations and most importantly your XF86 file ?

abbynormal, I know that feeling.

Actually I use one of a pair of HP Vectra PII-400s with 192Mb RAM as a testbed.

People often argue against proprietory PCs like HP or IBM saying that they are no better than unbranded rebadged "clones" but I've found both of these run far better than unbranded PII-400 clones with 256 Mb of RAM. And I have a 600Meg AMD powered IBM Aptiva I threw more RAM at and it serves web pages magnificently!

You may like to consider a way out of the chicken situation.

The testbed machine has a pair of plug-in IDE drive racks that fit into the steel cages that normally you fit the drives into. They are wired with the regular 4-pin power cables and the ribbon data cables. So I am able to try, using a removeable HDD, a large number of different Operating Systems.

I've described this, almost a step by step instruction, for even the faintest of hearts, at http://www.eagles-lair.org/computers...bledrives.html if you would like to check the idea out

In fact I have two machines like that, the other is a clone running a 1300MHz processor and 256Mb of RAM, and am about to extend the idea to other machines, to permit the moving of webservers and their pages from one machine to another quickly, in the event of a disaster! And also data from one machine to another, which is even faster than copying gigabytes across a Local Area Network too