Distribution for an old box

[Polu]

Hello.

I want to reuse an old box (PII 200Mhz, 96Mb RAM, 6Gb HD). It has been upgraded with a PCI/USB bridge. Its main mission will be to act as a proxy server, although it could be used as a web server/print server/ftp server/DB server in near future.
I want a linux distribution with the following requisites:

- Easy and quick installation and maintenance; I have no much time to spend in this machine.
- Zero hardware issues. I am a bit worried about the PCI/USB bridge.
- Low hardware requisites. It is an old box.

So, I think that Mandrake 10.1 is my choice, but I am not sure. What do you think? Is Mandrake 10.1 adecuate or am I wrong?

Thank you all.

Polu.

 

[franklin97355]

Add much more ram and a bigger hard drive if you are going to try any of the newer versions of Linux out of the box.

 

[thedaver]

At first I was going to respond negatively to franklin's post, but after reading the OP's list of DISK-INTENSIVE and DISK-CONSUMING tasks (proxy, ftp, print) you are definitely going to be encountering some risk of 1) running out of disk space, 2) running out of memory, 3) running out of CPU.

These risks are IF you are going to enable all those services. Linux is great and efficient, but all things have their limits... "blood from a stone"......

Internet Directory

http://dir.surfinbox.com/dir.php/Top

 

[franklin97355]

thedaver, thanks, for sure if Polu was going to run one app and run in commandline mode (after rebuilding the kernel to remove all the fluff) I think it would work. I ment to warn him that he was asking a lot from that poor computer.

 

[Polu]

Hello.

Thank you for your advice.
Now I'm not sure about what to do. If I use the computer only as a proxy and set runlevel 3, will it be OK? I don't want to rebuild the kernel; I cannot spent too much time in this. I prefer an "out of the box" solution.
What if I install an old version of mandrake (i.e. 9.2)? I don't know anything about this distribution. Will it be as quick to install as 10.1 looks like?

Thank you!

Polu.

 

[danomac]

If you are looking for a proxy/firewall/etc you might look for something dedicated to it rather than a distro. If you do this using it as an ftp server/

http://www server

etc will not work.

I have a Pentium-200 with 96MB RAM and a 3GB HDD, and I run smoothwall on it. It acts as firewall/router for a 2.5mbit connection and it does fine. It does have a web proxy on it but I don't use it.

It also allows ssh and there is a web configuration that allows you to set up the configuration.

It comes as a bootable CD iso that you download, and the installation is fairly straightforward, but I'm not too sure about your hardware.

It's at

http://www.smoothwall.org/

if you want to look at it.