[olug] Distro recommendation

[Ben Dinger]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2004 at 02:47:48PM -0600, Ryan Stille wrote:
> I need to install linux on a 333Mhz machine with 128MB of ram.  It will
> serve as a web server, low volume file server (less than 50MB of stuff),
> and eventually a router.  I don't know how big the hard drive is,
> probably 3-5GB.  I will need X installed but will only fire it up once
> in a while to administer something (like the web interface on an
> attached wireless bridge).
>  
> Fedora is probably too much of a resource hog, and I'm not familiar with
> many other distros.
>  
> I'd like something that works similar to Redhat/fedora, because that's
> what I'm used to and it will be easier to administer.  Any suggestions?

How about Suse?  I'd imagine Fedora would be fine as well, as long as you stripped it down and didn't use Gnome or KDE (I prefer Windowmaker, personally).  Or if it's firewalled, Redhat 9 would be fine as well.  Hell, I'm still running Redhat 9 on the 400mhz Xeon that handles static content hosting at work.  It gets quite a few hits, and has no problem.  New kernel and Apache compiles are a little slow compared to newer hardware, but eh :). 

It's all a matter of stripping out the fluff, espescially with a web/file server.  Or even with a desktop.  At work we have four machines in our warehouse that are used to process outgoing orders.  They are all PIII's @ 600mhz with either 64MB or 192MB of RAM.  On a whim I threw SuSE on one, and customized Windowmaker a little bit (think of almost like a Kiosk), and was surprised to find that the users liked it *better* than Windows 98.  It was both faster/more responsive, and as one put it "we don't have to turn it off 8 times a day".  In fact, now all four machines have 100+ day uptimes :)

Anyway, point is, just strip down anything.  



-- 
Ben Dinger
ben at mac-geek.com
"The Pope?  How many divisions has he got?" --Josef Stalin