A friend want's to give me an old Clunker computer. It is 16Mb and 3 Gb hard drive. I haven't looked at it. Don't even know what size processor it has. What can I do with it? Is it good enough to run a server off of? I was in the market for a used computer to start and learn about hosting and this is what came my way so far. LOL. I have the server running on my own computer now, but it's taking all my resources with just one page. So can I learn about hosting with this one Old Clunker of a computer? Is 16MB enough memory? Not sure what OS I would put in it yet. It might come with DOS. LOL :cartman:


Be nice to the newbie. :D

16MB memory?

I personally wouldnt even use that for learning Linux if that is what you are planning. I would think a MIN of 64 MB of RAM, and that is still low.

Naw, its fine. As long as you arent hosting anything important on it. Be prepared to wait...and wait some more though. Ha! It should be okay to learn on.

doesn't floppix have a small buildin webserver? I distro of linux boots from a floppy, its all command line though, and not much function but it would run better on that then a gui interfaced linux

There is a server run on a Commodore 64 computer with 64K of memory. That free computer will be fine to build your skills on. If you want to learn, load up a linux distro on the drive ( 3 GB is more than enough) and plug away.

Originally posted by Coach
There is a server run on a Commodore 64 computer with 64K of memory. That free computer will be fine to build your skills on. If you want to learn, load up a linux distro on the drive ( 3 GB is more than enough) and plug away.

Ok thanks :) But what is distro? I never heard that word before. I tried to Google it but nothing came up for the definition. It just talked about it, but didn't tell what it was. :blush:

Distro means a Distribution of linux. For example check out www.linuxiso.org for a wide variety of "Distro's" Or Flavors as some people call it.

Originally posted by tom brown
Ok thanks :) But what is distro? I never heard that word before. I tried to Google it but nothing came up for the definition. It just talked about it, but didn't tell what it was. :blush:

lol. someone beat me to it. it just mean different company use different parts in their linux but under the hood, the core are the same.

distro = distribution or what release of linux ie redhat, fedora, yellowdog, knoppix.

http://linuxiso.org/ most of those are too much for an old pc but its a good spot to start

Maybe I'll just by a brand new E-machine for 300.00 on sale instead. This way I won't have any headaches and it will have everything already in it. Lots of memory, HD and processor speed. What do you think? Good idea? :angry:

just stay away from the shared video memory, make sure the video is on its own card not built-in to the motherboard. For what you wanna do you don't need much of a video card probably get one $20-30, but worth it. Pick a distro of linux and then find out the specs they say to follow then you are set. And get ready for some headaches learning the command line way that linux is :) But hey its like 100 times for stable then windows :)

Get RedHat, there are alot of RedHat hosts out there. FreeBSD is also a good option.

With 3GB of disk space, you should be able to use it. I would install FreeBSD, and make a swap partition of 256-512MB. Be prepared to give the server plenty of time to do work, since wth 16MB of RAM, it's going to be swapping quite a bit.

Edit: You want want to use FreeBSD 4.x on such as server, not 5.x.

It should be clarified that FreeBSD is *NOT* a distribution of Linux. It is a derivative of BSD, developed at Berkeley: http://www.freebsd.org/

You should read up on it as well, and decide if you want to learn FreeBSD or Linux

forgot about that, redhat and fedora core would be good linux distros to learn many web servers run those

just don't think once you install Unix/Linux. you don't need to do the extra work to harden it.

44 security holes in *nix have beend founded

http://it.slashdot.org/it/04/12/15/2113202.shtml?tid=172&tid=146&tid=128&tid=130&tid=1&tid=106

This might be off-topic but if you walk down the street; on some occasions i have been able to find up to three systems that are P3 600's and for a minimal investment (200 bucks) you could even purchase a usable system.

T

Originally posted by AllianceNet
This might be off-topic but if you walk down the street; on some occasions i have been able to find up to three systems that are P3 600's and for a minimal investment (200 bucks) you could even purchase a usable system.

T

or a AMD Duron from WalMart for the same price :)

Originally posted by jt2377
or a AMD Duron from WalMart for the same price :)

That's what I was thinking. :cool:

Salvation army has killer deals on p3 500-1ghz around here. Full system (puter, monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc..) for < $200

try friends, my friends and I are also swapping parts depending on who needs what, I got a motherboard and cpu (1gig duron) from a friend, and he got an IDE controller card that was sitting in my drawer. There are lots of ways to get used parts.