I am having trouble installing Linux (red hat) on my 200MHZ pentium. I download the files (FC3-i386-disc1.iso, FC3-i386-disc2.iso, FC3-i386-disc3.iso, FC3-i386-disc4.iso) and burn 4 cds. Putting Disc1 in the pc and boot up from it. A list of regular message is shown on screen and the pc stopped at (Verifying DMI Pool Data .... Boot from ATAPI CD-ROM). There is a prompt but the keyboard is non functional.
My next question to you is that should I burn all four CDs with the md5sum file.
At home, I use FC2 on 200MHz Pentium MMX, 96MB of RAM (an old IBM desktop I bought on garage sale, two for $10 CAN) as firewall/router/print-server/web-server/mail-server/DNS/squid-proxy (hm, I guess this is all). It runs all of that just fine. I'm currently offloading services to an old Sparc machine I added recently to my basement (running Aurora, which is port of Fedora Core for Sparc machines). The reason for moving services to different machine is not performance, it is security. I just want to have firewall be dedicated firewall. The only time when it choked was when I was upgrading the kernel last time (for whatever reason, rpm process grew to almost 200MB, more than twice the RAM I have in the machine).
I also have FC3 on 233MHz Pentium MMX, 256MB of RAM (Scenic Mobile 710 laptop). On this one I have GUI. GNOME is a bit slow, but XFCE runs just fine.
So as far as performance, you should be fine as long as you have enough memory (but don't expect that things will fly as on newer P3 or P4 machine, it will be slow, but usable).
For installation, since I was installing single machine, and all the packages that I was installing from all four CDs combined would probably fit on one CD (and didn't had intention to reinstall anytime soon) what I did was downloaded only the rescue CD. Booted from it with "linux askmethod" (on the first splash screen you get as soon as CD boots). When asked, I configured my network card and selected HTTP as install method from local Fedora mirror (you can also install from download.fedora.redhat.com, but it might be faster to use a mirror that is close to you). For directory on HTTP server you should select the top directory of the distribution, the one containing Fedora directory (usually something like /pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os, edit according to where this is located on your local mirror). You should be able to find list of all mirrors on Fedora web site.
Of course, if you are installing "Everything", or need to do multiple installations (or are just playing and might reinstall often), it will be faster (and less bandwith consuming) to download all CDs, than to install over the net.
-- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic@xxxxxx> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
