Putting an old tower to work.

wolfgangmob

What would be a good distro to make use of an old PIII 866MHz tower with 512MB PC100 memory (128+128+256) and 2 IDE Hard drives 15GB and 10GB, what distro could make use of this box and what use could I make of this box, it has dual ethernet ports (one on the motherboard and one PCI card).

raluxs

You can try several , the first obvious options are the mini-distros like Puppy Linux or Damn Small Linux. Another option is to use a regular distro with a light graphical environment. Right now I am using a Pentium III 1 ghz wtih 386Mb RAM with Mandriva Free 2009.1 and the LXDE graphical environment and it is very usable.

I also have an old laptop with a Pentium III 500mhz with 256MB also running mandiva 2009 with Icewm. It will not break any speed record but lets me browse the internet and watch youtube very fine.

Good luck

Zanpaktou

Any distro will be fine. I've got a lower spec pentium 3 machine that runs kde 4 fine when it has to. You don't have to go down the route of the minimal desktop distribution unless you want to use the machine as an everyday desktop machine.

If you want to build a server (e.g. Media server) Without xorg running, debian is the thing for that.