Xubuntu on a Cyrix M-II 150Hrz
Over the past week I’ve been playing with old hardware. I decided that I wanted a Linux machine to play about with and maybe use as a test web server for development. First step was to find some old hardware which wasn’t too hard as we have lots of old ATX cases lying around. I managed to find myself an old motherboard(which as far as I can determine is an 583lmr12, whatever that is) that has a Cyrix M-II 150 (150Hrz? ~0.15Ghz? he he), a power supply unit (AC 230), a floppy drive(just in case), a CD-ROM drive(a 24x Creative, woo) and a Samsung 10.2GB hard drive.
Off I went putting the thing together first to see what I could get out of it. First problem was it didn’t boot into the hard drive but that’s not so bad seeing as I have no clue what’s on their. I see if i can find some information on the motherboard and see if I can upgrade the BIOS, no luck but I managed to find a manual for the motherboard, this was a very long google session indeed, around six hours I think.
After that I decided to play with the jumper settings on the board. Disable modem… check, enable Ethernet… check, enable on board sound… check, reset bios… crap. Whilst setting up the BIOS again I notice that when I come to check for hard drives it displays it in the right location(hd0) but crashes to sound of me hitting the keyboard and the system blipping away. This is a problem, everything else in the BIOS is OK, it just doesn’t properly configure the hard drive. Next I try every jumper setting I can to find the problem with no luck, gah. I then come to the conclusion that it must be broken and put it on the ‘to go out the window’ pile that now consists of the hard drive and an ATX case. I gather up my 80GB Excelstar I have spare and stick that in, but it doesn’t recognise it, grrr? I try all the master jumper settings and it likes it all of a sudden, the reason? I’ve limited it to 32GB, oh well, progress is progress. Next I make myself a Debian installation CD on suggestion of Jonny and stick it in the CD-ROM drive; boot from floppy… none, boot from CD-ROM… none, boot from hd0… HANG! At this point I’m a little peeved and leave it with the intention of giving up and throwing it all back in the loft or out the window.
Next day I have an idea, I’m using a CD-R to try and boot from, it’s an old CD-ROM, D’OH! After a scavenge around the house I get myself a comparatively shiny 32x LG CD-RW drive and stick in the Debian CD in on suggestion of Jonny. It boots. Hooray! I start the four hour installation of Debian, remembering that this thing has the speed of a drunk snail. Once that’s done it works, great apart from having been a windows user for a long time I’m faced with a command line so I decide that I need a GUI for it. I reckon KDE should do nicely, I’ve found the right commands on the internet to get it using aptitude package manager, apt-get install kde kdm, wicked. It downloads and gives me some options, cool this is easy. Oh how wrong I was. In short I try installing KDE 4 times but it just doesn’t like me! I give up again and go to bed.
I talk to Jonny about it the next day and he gives me a hand, fires up openSSH and gets into my machine. He gives up and suggests Xubuntu. I decide it can’t hurt and go get the installation disk made. Another four hours or so and installation of Xubuntu is complete. I login and try download some packages using aptitude again but computer says no. It seems that this time there’s no network, it just tells me ‘Network is unreachable’, very helpful, thanks. So after two days playing with various commands and surfing the internet continuously I try the command ifconfig -a and everything starts to work. What? Never mind, progress and all.
So now I have a working up to date Xubuntu installation, get in! I install LAMP using four commands in the terminal and bam it works. Unfortunately the box it just too slow to use as a test server with an average of 20 seconds to return a page that normally take 0.9. Ho hum. It’s definitely been a learning experience and I’m determined to find a use for the poor little fella.