[CentOS] [OT] old kit and kaboodle, obFriday (was:Re: Is it okay?)

Sat Jan 22 02:21:18 UTC 2011
Cia Watson <ciamarie at my180.net>

On Fri, 21 Jan 2011 14:28:26 -0500
Lamar Owen <lowen at pari.edu> wrote:

> On Friday, January 21, 2011 01:29:14 pm John R Pierce wrote:
> > $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
> > ...
> > model name      : Pentium III (Katmai)
> > cpu MHz         : 451.031
> > ...

> I have a few K6-2 300 systems here that would be ideal for a few uses
> if I could get something a little more modern than the i586 C4 build
> running on them... for that matter, perhaps I need the i586 C4 build
> on them.... They are Agilent ATMProbes that had a custom dual OC12
> card complex, with the K6-2 board, which is not PC form-factor
> compliant, acting as a controller for the specialized atm cell
> capture/analysis complex.

I have an old amd k6 (600 I think?) which currently just barely runs
Mint 9 LXDE. I made the mistake of letting it update grub and a kernel
and one or the other of those updates made it decide to reboot as soon
as it should have brought up the grub menu, so I had to re-install it.
Now the only thing I'll let through for an update is if it's cups or
related to cups. 

It previously had Vector Linux on it for a very short time, but since
that uses lilo and is based on slackware, I decided to use Mint 9 lxde
instead since it booted it o.k. I had enough issues getting a handle on
grub.  Before that it had Win98 on it. 

I rarely turn it on, I thought I'd give it a spin as a print server for
my very old Panasonic dot matrix printer, since it has a parallel port.
But it is really slow. I have a PIII 500mhz laptop running Fedora 12
(gnome-openbox) that's faster. fwiw.