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A Dive into the BIOS
I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon "fighting" with the old system I had acquired. I begun with an uncasing and thorough looksee of the inside components. As previously mentioned, there was no HDD, but 2 CD drives, a DVD Drive and a 3.5 Floppy drive (I hadn't seen one of those in quite a long time). This rough glance wasn't enough to get the specs of the processor and memory, so I booted up the system (which, ironically, did so without a hitch).
I've worked with old systems before, but damn...the BIOS on this motherboard was from 1999. Guess what the specs were?
Pentium III 800 Mhz
256 DDR memory
All the drives above
I can't believe someone was using this as their main business computer (their was business was antiques, I kid you not!)
Wow! I figured it would be worth a shot to try to boot the Live CD from Ubuntu and get some more specific system information. Alas, I had the following error: "DRIVE BOOT FAILED, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND HIT ENTER". Now, I went through the BIOS, ensuring that all of the various Master/Slave configurations were set and tried again, same error. I had noticed earlier that two drives were on the same cable...perhaps that was throwing off the computer? I disassembled and booted up again. This trial and error session went on for the better part of an hour, until it hit me, I did not order the boot sequence! Low and behold, there it was, "A,C, CDROM". It truly was a facepalm moment. The CD booted just fine after rearranging the boot sequence to "CDROM, C, A". Most modern BIOSs will go through the list of drives until they find one that works, apparently, back in 1999, they didn't do that. If #1 in the list failed, you fail.
Unfortunately, I did not get to try out as much as Ubuntu on this system as I would have liked for a couple of reasons, first: no HDD, second: it's a piece of crap. I was pleased that Ubuntu auto recognized the Ethernet connection, but on 256MB of memory and a 800 Mhz processor, I really couldn't do anything important, nor much of anything other then in a snail's pace. Coming from a guy who has been using dual/quad core for the last several years, this was beyond frustrating.
I'll probably snap a picture when I open it back up when the hard drive gets here (along with a spare mouse/keyboard, from Newegg), but for now, enjoy these:
The proverbial Piece O' Crap (it's Irish!)
Ubuntu Up and running off of the Live CD
--KYA
I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon "fighting" with the old system I had acquired. I begun with an uncasing and thorough looksee of the inside components. As previously mentioned, there was no HDD, but 2 CD drives, a DVD Drive and a 3.5 Floppy drive (I hadn't seen one of those in quite a long time). This rough glance wasn't enough to get the specs of the processor and memory, so I booted up the system (which, ironically, did so without a hitch).
I've worked with old systems before, but damn...the BIOS on this motherboard was from 1999. Guess what the specs were?
Pentium III 800 Mhz
256 DDR memory
All the drives above
I can't believe someone was using this as their main business computer (their was business was antiques, I kid you not!)
Wow! I figured it would be worth a shot to try to boot the Live CD from Ubuntu and get some more specific system information. Alas, I had the following error: "DRIVE BOOT FAILED, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND HIT ENTER". Now, I went through the BIOS, ensuring that all of the various Master/Slave configurations were set and tried again, same error. I had noticed earlier that two drives were on the same cable...perhaps that was throwing off the computer? I disassembled and booted up again. This trial and error session went on for the better part of an hour, until it hit me, I did not order the boot sequence! Low and behold, there it was, "A,C, CDROM". It truly was a facepalm moment. The CD booted just fine after rearranging the boot sequence to "CDROM, C, A". Most modern BIOSs will go through the list of drives until they find one that works, apparently, back in 1999, they didn't do that. If #1 in the list failed, you fail.
Unfortunately, I did not get to try out as much as Ubuntu on this system as I would have liked for a couple of reasons, first: no HDD, second: it's a piece of crap. I was pleased that Ubuntu auto recognized the Ethernet connection, but on 256MB of memory and a 800 Mhz processor, I really couldn't do anything important, nor much of anything other then in a snail's pace. Coming from a guy who has been using dual/quad core for the last several years, this was beyond frustrating.
I'll probably snap a picture when I open it back up when the hard drive gets here (along with a spare mouse/keyboard, from Newegg), but for now, enjoy these:
The proverbial Piece O' Crap (it's Irish!)
Ubuntu Up and running off of the Live CD
--KYA
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6 Comments On This Entry
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skaoth
02 August 2009 - 09:43 PM
Ubuntu has gotten pretty bloated especially for a Linux distribution. However, that is probably the price to pay for it being much easier to use out of the box.
One option for such a low spec system is to use debian with a window manager like blackbox/fluxbox.
http://www.us.debian...ch03s04.html.en
or
slackware with fluxbox
One option for such a low spec system is to use debian with a window manager like blackbox/fluxbox.
http://www.us.debian...ch03s04.html.en
or
slackware with fluxbox
no2pencil
02 August 2009 - 11:57 PM
If you want old computers, try loading Linux on a Pentium 1... back before cdroms were able to boot. You used to have to copy an entire "series" to floppy disks in order to get a bootable kernel with network access. Then you could finish the install over the ftp.
You kids got it so easy these days
You kids got it so easy these days
KYA
03 August 2009 - 04:56 AMno2pencil, on 2 Aug, 2009 - 11:57 PM, said:
If you want old computers, try loading Linux on a Pentium 1... back before cdroms were able to boot. You used to have to copy an entire "series" to floppy disks in order to get a bootable kernel with network access. Then you could finish the install over the ftp.
You kids got it so easy these days
You kids got it so easy these days
I would do it just for the sake of doing it, but there comes a time in a man's life when he would just rather say no
thesilentenigma
04 August 2009 - 05:46 AM
You seem to be running GNOME, have you tried the Ubuntu-variant distribution Xubuntu which runs the xfce environment? I ran a P-II on it and it ran beautifully.
Fluxbox would be awesome too.
Don't be so quick to dismiss old technology - don't forget that "proverbial Piece O' Crap" you have on your hands is a supercomputer by the standards of the 60s/70s. ;-)
Fluxbox would be awesome too.
Don't be so quick to dismiss old technology - don't forget that "proverbial Piece O' Crap" you have on your hands is a supercomputer by the standards of the 60s/70s. ;-)
KYA
04 August 2009 - 06:48 AM
I know. The perspective is amazing. Hopefully I didn't sound too condescending, that wasn't my intention.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'm going to try it later.
Thanks for the suggestion, I'm going to try it later.
Tom9729
04 August 2009 - 03:30 PM
Hmm I have a couple of machines with those specs. Can't speak for Ubuntu, but using any kind of livecd on a machine that old is a nightmare. Runs pretty well once everything is installed though.
If you're really impatient, do the install on a faster machine and then move the hard drive over.
If you're really impatient, do the install on a faster machine and then move the hard drive over.
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