Mystery lowend machine lowend grunt work lowend even temporary OS anyone 221

ok,

ok,

there should be no problem for that box to do the task that you described, since you dont need a GUI interface, the amount of ram is sufficiant. in fact, that box would be perfect for that task.

ok, what you need to do is take the cover off the box & look inside. what you need to do is look for two IDE connectors on the motherboard. one will already be occupied with a ribbon lead going to the hard drive. the empty IDE connector will be the one you will use for the CDRom. next, you need to take the front panel off & remove the steel knockout covering the drive bay (note) a vast majority of the "AT" type cases had steel covers that you had to remove before you could install any drives in the drive bay. it is highly recommended that you use a 10x drive or faster. a lot of the older drives have a difficult time reading CD-R's

there is one thing i need to point out. almost all of the old P1 motherboards BIOS's did not have a option to be able to be booted off of the CDRom. some distributions (like debian) had a "boot" floppy image that you could create a boot floppy so you could access the CDRom for the installation files.

as far as identifying the network card, you will need to physically remove the card from the socket & look for the model-make of the card. if this a old ISA card, it is best that you remove it completely & replace it with that D-Link card you have. considering that motherboard is a p-166, it should already have PCI slots. you stand a better chance of the linux distributions detecting your "nic" card if it is a PCI type.

not needed

that was because the old network interface card was either unsupported or it was set in "plug-n-play" mode.

yes, debian "sarge" base-install. what you need to do is go to the Debian site & download the cddrivers.img & create a floppy with it.

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