Re: [UM-LINUX] Making on old machine a useful terminal

[Nick Cummings]

Thanks for all the suggestions, but it looks like maybe it's a lost cause 
in the end.  I ended up burning a Damn Small Linux live CD, a 60 MB linux 
distribution based on debian, and an accompanying boot disk.  That was a 
snap to get up and running (think more like Knoppix than Gentoo), though 
the generic video driver didn't work all that well with the video card (I 
think they just include the generic one for the sake of space).  The plan 
was to install to the hard drive and then apt-get an XServer with the 
appropriate video driver; however, the CD drive would intermittently have 
read errors.  We replaced it with a different CD drive and still had the 
intermittent errors, plus sometimes it wouldn't see the drive at all.  My 
guess is that there's a problem with the motherboard itself (IDE 
controller or bus), and it's probably a fair bet that hard drive I/O will 
have problems too, so I think we're just giving up on this idea.  It's 
probably not worth messing with in order to get a P-200 desktop.  :-)

Thanks,
Nick