Pentium 75, Debian and lots of boot disks!

[Doogee]

Hi all.

I recently got a Pentium 75mhz from my school.

This system has only 16 megs of ram so i didnt think i should install red hat8 or Mandrake 9, then i saw my debian CD (yes i only have 1 cd).
My real questions are:

1 : What packages should i select?
2 : How much would i have to download to get a decent system since i only have the first disk?
3 : Is it easy to setup adsl using DHCP and an ethernet ADSL modem/router? And is there a guide on doing so?
4 : Is Debian really the way to go, i mean are there any better one disk distros around?

Thanks!

[voidmain]

Is there any way you can scrounge up some more RAM? That's going to be your real killer. A P75 can be a very useful machine but RAM makes the difference. For instance, a couple of days ago I took a P100 with 96MB of RAM and a 1.2GB drive, installed Red Hat 8.0 and made a PDC/WINS/DHCP/DNS server out of it. It works *great*.

I didn't install any Xwindows stuff. It is using up around 90MB but most of that is cached/buffered. I could easily have gotten by with a little less RAM, maybe even as little as 32MB but I really wouldn't want to go less than 64.

Now if you absolutely can't find more RAM you are likely going to have to go to an older distro with an older kernel. But you should be able to scrounge up some more RAM for nothing. Somebody must have some fried machines lying around that you can steal some RAM out of. The type of RAM that these old machines use won't work with the newer computers anyway.

[ December 16, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[Doogee]

i think the type of RAM i need is SDRAM but im not entirely sure. any way to check?

Also what are some other good distros for an old pooter like that. I would rather X but can live with terminal only, as long as i can get my ADSL going it would be great.

Just a little while ago i tried running debian (needed 2 boot disks) and i partitioned with cfdisk (not too hard) and got it going. Then i had to make another boot disk to boot to debian so i made it and rebooted it asked me about md5 or shadow passwords i chose shadow. Then it was the root user and normal user accounts so i made those. then it said it needed to install something (base system, not sure though) and it said i had a bad CD. I dont think its damaged but i dont know if it has the data on it. I could do a net install but it only has a PPP dialup config on the install. Anyway i could get it through the ADSL? I cant really download everything (ie whole disks) because ill end up not using alot of the stuff on it, so a net install would be fine cause i could just download what i need.

Another thing. I couldnt load the NE2000 kernel module so thats probably why it wouldnt have ethernet as an option. I tried to install the ne2000pci module but it didnt work so i tried it with different irqs and it still didnt work. Im not very good with hardware so is there anyway to see how i need to configure the network card?


Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!!!

[choasforages]

i would recommend not putting X on at first. remember, apt can do it better then you could manaully


and if there is no way for more ram, NetBSD might work better

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by X11 && BOB: void main wannabe.:
Off-Topic Note to void:
I read your DHCP/DNS Article, i used the DHCP bit and now all my dad has to do is plug is laptop into the 100/10mb switch. And he can type "bugpond" at the command line of the Gateway to connect to the net, share the connection...
As seen in this article i wrote!

You can make it easier than that if you want. You can make it as easy as plugging in his laptop and just open the browser and your dialup server will detect someone is trying to get to the internet and automatically dial up. I used to use "diald" for this. Don't ask me to help with configuration. It wasn't the easiest thing to set up. There might be something better than "diald" to do the same thing now though. I used diald on my gateway for several years before getting cable.

[Doogee]

Err thats great but does anyone want to help me with debian? and my irq and all that?????