I finally trashed my 14 year old Pentium II computer--it ran Windows2000 fine, but never could run Linux much at all

I threw out my Linux Pentium Two today, bought in 1996 or 1997, in the
trash, after busting with a sledgehammer the Seagate 2 GB (yes two
gbs!) HDs and the 48 MB RAM. I found out how the RAM was configured,
after all these years: four sticks--I kid you not--of 16x2 and two
sticks of 8x2 = 32 + 16 = 48 MB. LOL.

And it ran fine Windows 2000. But it had a hard time running Linux
(among other things the CD-ROM was hard to mount). I tried Puppy, DSL
(had the best luck with this) and Mint. All with the same disastrous
results.

The graphics card was laughable. I think it was some 8 bit S3 Virge
or some such with the barest of video RAM--I did not bother to even
look. I forget if it even had a video card fan--I think it had a tiny
one, certainly nothing like the massive heat exchangers of today. 200
W or so power supply, but it got the job done. Floppy disk drive of
course, that hardly ever failed even though it was a decade+ old. No
blown capacitors. But again, Windows 2000 never had a problem with
this old hardware (since that was the OS, right after Windows 98, that
I targeted this machine for, proving that Windows works fine if you
have the right hardware for it).

I was just tired of having it around as a paperweight, though it
worked fine. I guess I could have donated it, but the HDs had data on
them and despite some freeware (CCleaner, an otherwise fine program,
could not completely wipe out the disk of data in Windows 2000), I
could not nuke the HDs (zero them out) using software...so I just took
a hammer to them, which short of using an electron microscope to
reconstruct data from shards works fine to clean your HDs of data.

RL

On Jun 16, 2:16*am, RayLopez99 wrote:
I threw out my Linux Pentium Two today, bought in 1996 or 1997, in the
trash, after busting with a sledgehammer the Seagate 2 GB

I call this a Linux machine since I did have Linux dual booted on it.

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:

On Jun 16, 2:16 am, RayLopez99 wrote:
I threw out my Linux Pentium Two today, bought in 1996 or 1997, in the
trash, after busting with a sledgehammer the Seagate 2 GB

I call this a Linux machine since I did have Linux dual booted on it.

No, you didn't.
You claim to, just like Hadron does. This does not make it true.
You are way too stupid to run anything which wasn't pre-installed.

You could not succesfully spill a bucket of water without seriously botching
it

On Thursday 16 June 2011 00:19 RayLopez99 wrote:

On Jun 16, 2:16 am, RayLopez99 wrote:
I threw out my Linux Pentium Two today, bought in 1996 or 1997, in the
trash, after busting with a sledgehammer the Seagate 2 GB

I call this a Linux machine since I did have Linux dual booted on it.

All very interesting, Ray - especially the configuration of the computer
that the "self-made millionaire" was using at the time (a few months ago)
that he was asking advice about:-
- Whether he should use WD40 rather than buy a new CPU fan!
- Whether WD40 would keep his case fan going, rather than replace it!
- Preferred, instead of that huge outlay, to leave the side
off his computer, and point a domestic fan at the innards!

- and I don't believe that you ever had Linux running on it.
In fact, I don't believe you have ever installed Linux on anything.

I told you what the problem is when you tried - you are too dense.

Am Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:16:37 -0700 schrieb RayLopez99:

And it ran fine Windows 2000. But it had a hard time running Linux
(among other things the CD-ROM was hard to mount). I tried Puppy, DSL
(had the best luck with this) and Mint. All with the same disastrous
results.

I feel with you - because of only 48 MB ram. What exactly did you do with
this machine? Even running a modern browser should have been too much for
that little memory...

Could you maybe explain "disastrous results" more?
Following the wikipedia article DSL should be able to run.. somehow:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_sm...m_requirements
"DSL has been demonstrated browsing the web with Dillo, running simple
games and playing music on systems with a 486 processor and 16 MB of RAM."

I haven't heard much about puppy but I'm not sure if it is really
optimized for such really old hardware anymore.

Linux Mint... Obviously it won't run well on 48 mb ram.

The right comparison would be to run a Linux distribution from the year ~
2000/2001 also. But I understand why that would be unpleasant and I
wouldn't do that either.

I would maybe test some modern distributions meant for embedded systems
with low specs.

[WinTroll] wrote:
after busting with a sledgehammer the Seagate 2 GB

....because he's too stupid to set that up as swap
and get the last several useful months out of it.

....or wipe it with DBAN and donate it to a charity.
(Linux includes dd which will do this from the bootable CD.)

Peter Köhlmann wrote:
You are way too stupid to run anything which wasn't pre-installed.

Obviously.

Multi-user Puppy, Damn Small Linux, MEPIS antiX, SliTaz,
ConnochaetOS (formerly DeLi Linux),
and the recently mentioned Zenix
will all run on any box with 64MB of RAM.

The only hardware I have had Linux fail to embrace on a PII
was a LoseModem.

The troll is obviously a liar.

RayLopez99 wrote:
I threw out my Linux Pentium Two today, bought in 1996 or 1997, in the
trash, after busting with a sledgehammer the Seagate 2 GB (yes two
gbs!) HDs and the 48 MB RAM.

And it ran fine Windows 2000. But it had a hard time running Linux

MS sez 2K minimums:
133 MHz or more Pentium microprocessor
64 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended minimum. 32 MB of RAM is the
minimum supported.

I could not nuke the HDs (zero them out) using software

Hiren's boot CD has several utilities for shredding/ erasing/
overwriting hdd.

That is not the purpose of CCleaner.

--
Mike Easter

Peter Köhlmann stated in post on 6/15/11 4:23 PM:

RayLopez99 wrote:

On Jun 16, 2:16 am, RayLopez99 wrote:
I threw out my Linux Pentium Two today, bought in 1996 or 1997, in the
trash, after busting with a sledgehammer the Seagate 2 GB

I call this a Linux machine since I did have Linux dual booted on it.

No, you didn't.
You claim to, just like Hadron does. This does not make it true.
You are way too stupid to run anything which wasn't pre-installed.

You could not succesfully spill a bucket of water without seriously botching
it

And this is something the "advocates" will not speak out against.


--
[INSERT .SIG HERE]

Chris wrote:
[...]only 48 MB ram

Not a problem--if you're *really* interested in Linux
--unlike the stupid WinTroll.

Even running a modern browser

Obviously, with Windoze,
he was running Internet Exploder 6 on that.
Nothing approaching modern.

should have been too much for that little memory

Depending on your definition of "modern".

[...]Dillo[...]

Bingo!

Linux Mint... Obviously it won't run well on 48 [MB] ram.

....not even the lightest spin of Mint (Fluxbox Edition).
Windoze XP and Vista and Vista 7 won't run on it either.

On the antiX forum,
user "drg" got the 486 spin of MEPIS antiX running with 32MB
and installed with 48MB.
If he'd had exactly 40 MB, he figured that would have installed too.
http://tinyurl.com/antiX-WillRunIn32MB
http://antix.freeforums.org/post17065.html

Had the WinTroll been even slightly interested,
he would have ASKED first
instead of shooting off his stupid mouth
and expecting a heavyweight distro that can compete with Vista 7
to install on ancient, low-spec crap.

On Jun 16, 2:38*am, Chris wrote:
Am Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:16:37 -0700 schrieb RayLopez99:

And it ran fine Windows 2000. *But it had a hard time running Linux
(among other things the CD-ROM was hard to mount). *I tried Puppy, DSL
(had the best luck with this) and Mint. *All with the same disastrous
results.

I feel with you - because of only 48 MB ram. What exactly did you do with
this machine? Even running a modern browser should have been too much for
that little memory...

It did an incredible amount of disk thrashing, but it worked. And it
worked under some versions of Linux, that's amazing. But it worked
best in Windows 2000.

I did nothing major with it. I played some chess games, and surfed
the net (even posted here using Linux browser)



Could you maybe explain "disastrous results" more?
Following the wikipedia article DSL should be able to run.. somehow:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_sm...m_requirements
"DSL has been demonstrated browsing the web with Dillo, running simple
games and playing music on systems with a 486 processor and 16 MB of RAM."

I haven't heard much about puppy but I'm not sure if it is really
optimized for such really old hardware anymore.

Linux Mint... Obviously it won't run well on 48 mb ram.

The right comparison would be to run a Linux distribution from the year ~
2000/2001 also. But I understand why that would be unpleasant and I
wouldn't do that either.


Yes, correct. But I could not find any old 2000 yr Linux distros.
From the year 2000 that is.


RL