Also, it would fit on this small hard drive at least as well as AntiX did. Granted, it's no longer supported but it's still better than Windows 98 and there are hardware video drivers available. What to do? I decided to try Windows XP instead. It was not obvious to me that there was a reasonably easy way to get hardware support for this chip in a supported version of Linux. After poking around it looked like there was no hardware driver being used for the on-board ATI Rage Pro.and after some more research it appeared that Linux had dropped support for that chip some time back. The screen refresh seemed incredibly slow. There was still one minor issue bugging me though. I attached to SETI and work units downloaded and and started crunching away. The three projects I most commonly use are and I only had a few hundred megabytes of disk space left and I found out real quick that wasn't going to be enough to run Rosetta. After this, BOINC was found and installed successfully. Finally, I figured out all I really needed to do was to go into the package manager and add some of the repositories that were not checked by default. First, I tried downloading the Linux version from the BOINC website but there seemed to be a lot of missing dependencies. Booting and installation went smoothly and everything was up and running in a relatively short amount of time.īOINC could not be found when executing the typical "sudo apt-get install boinc-client" command. It is Debian based like Ubuntu/Lubuntu and can use the same repositories, it has a live CD installer so I could try it, and it was designed to be installed and run using a hard drive unlike something like Puppy Linux which is designed more to run in memory after booting from a CD or USB device, and most importantly would still theoretically fit on this hard drive. Oh well, back to the tiny drive and an attempt to find another Linux distribution that will work.Īfter searching for a smaller Linux distribution I settled on one called AntiX. This card allowed the computer to recognize the drives I plugged into it but would then just hang on boot with a blinking cursor, even when I was trying to boot from CD. I also have a SATA PCI card so I figured I would give that a shot. For some reason though, this computer did not recognize drives as being attached with that card. I tried an ATA-133 PCI card thinking that might get me around the problem since those cards have their own BIOS. Sure enough, with the drives I tried they were either not recognized at all or recognized as 6-8 GB drives. I have a few spare hard drives but the smallest is 160 GB which I suspected this machine might have a problem recognizing. While not ideal, the CPU and memory were sufficient to run Lubuntu but unfortunately, at only ~2.5 GB the hard drive was not. There are a few much lighter distributions that will work on machines as old as a 486 but those distributions have their own challenges. It has relatively low requirements compared to many other distributions yet it is still full featured and easy to use. Normally when I go to install Linux on an older machine I use Lubuntu if possible. I found a version of BOINC that would run on Windows 98 but I couldn't get any work units for that version with any of the projects I commonly use so I decided to see if I could get some version of Linux running on it. ![]() To me it's kind of fun to see what they can do and how they compare to the relative super computers of today. The first thing I usually do when I get one of these old machines up and running is to see if I can run BOINC and crunch some work units on it. ![]() I believe the model of this machine is a Deskpro EN 6333 SFF (the SFF is for Small Form Factor) though information about this particular model seems to be scarce on the internet. The only quick and easy upgrade I could do was to add another 128 MB RAM which I had laying around for a total of 384 MB which I think may be the maximum this motherboard will handle (a 512 MB stick didn't work). Video and networking are built in and there is a riser card that contains one PCI slot and one PCI/ISA shared slot. There's not a lot in the way of extra hardware in this machine and there isn't room for much. It had a 333 MHz Pentium II, 256 MB RAM and still booted into Windows 98 SE. I powered it up for the first time in a number of years and the BIOS message on the bottom of the screen identifies it as a Deskpro EN model. Just determining the exact model proved to be somewhat of a challenge. It had Windows 98 installed and I have on occasion used it booted into DOS mode to emulate a disk drive for my Commodore 64 via 64HDD. I have a small form factor Compaq Deskpro that has been in my collection for a number of years. This expedition only went as far as my own archives.
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