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| Brandon | My Latest ProjectI am a well know collector of old shit, and my dad works with the boy scouts, they gave me some old PCs and I gave them a P3 With Office. They gave me an Intel 486SX 33Mhz system, and a P166 System. [url]http://www.abs.com/[/url] isn't well known, but they happen to be the manufacture of the P166, the socket says "BETA Socket 7" and it had a standard Pentium 166 in it. This mainboard proved unstable and not very impressive. Being all standard AT, meant the case and PSU would be perfect for a Super 7 AT motherboard I got. I traded with a local guy and got a Super 7 mainboard, a Rise Technology one, and I could never get it to boot, the fans would turn on but no video. I gave up and put it away. Then I got an ASUS board which seemed to boot. I didn't really have a use, and put it away. Then I tried to use it and it didn't work, not being my top priority, it was back in the closet. Until Sonicbrit brought up his K6 400, I decided to give it some work. First I killed the ASUS mobo, by connecting jumpers that shouldn't have been connected. Then I got the RISE motherboard out and realized the Voltage was at 3.5 and the CPU wanted 2.2 after this fix it started booting, sometimes. I had a small internal speaker hooked up to whichever mobo I was working on, and I started getting the same beep. One long 3 short. A quick google, and remembering that Wikipedia mentioned poor AGP on Super 7 boards led me to trying a different video card. The system has booted fine since. Next I needed an Operating System. Ubuntu is the most popular so any app I want should have an Ubuntu package. And because I've always been an XFCE fan, and because GNOME is a monster, I used Xubuntu 8.10. After the super long install, 2 hours at least, the system wouldn't boot. It would show some of the early kernel messages and freeze. After a few tries I finally got it to boot, and the boot was not speedy. Xubuntu itself is not very fast. I think more of this project will be choosing the right desktop and WM than anything else. Current Specs: [li]AMD K6-2 400AFQ[/li] [li]384MB SDRAM @ 100MHz[/li] [li]32MB AGP Diamond Multimedia Viper V770[/li] [li]DVD-ROM[/li] [li]2GB Seagate Hard Drive[/li] [li]3Com PCI 10/100 NIC[/li] [li]Creative Sound Blaster[/li] [li]Xubuntu 8.10[/li] Hardinfo report: [file name=k6_ram100.html size=28816]http://theguiblog.com/images/fbfiles/files/k6_ram100.html[/file] My goal is after customizing Xubuntu enough, it will be fast and usable, even after I cut the RAM down to 128MB. | 2009-02-22 | 10:43 AM |
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