I have an old PC laying around doing nothing, P2 233Mhz, 192MB Ram.
Thought I would play around and learn something about Linux, question is
this what is the best and free version to download and where is the best
place to get it? Also, after getting Linux installed I would like to
turn the PC into a firewall with a couple of spare NIC's, I have laying
around. What is the best firewall software and again looking for
something free.

Thank you for any responses in advance,


--
Danny Kile
Certified FCC, ISCET, A+ , Network+

Please reply to the Newsgroup ONLY
Your cooperation is appreciated.

Danny Kile wrote:
> I have an old PC laying around doing nothing, P2 233Mhz, 192MB Ram.
> Thought I would play around and learn something about Linux, question is
> this what is the best and free version to download and where is the best
> place to get it? Also, after getting Linux installed I would like to
> turn the PC into a firewall with a couple of spare NIC's, I have laying
> around. What is the best firewall software and again looking for
> something free.
>
> Thank you for any responses in advance,
>
>
I am not sure this is a good suggestion. I ran Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a
slower machine than that (Pentium 166 with 256 meg RAM), and it was OK.
When I upgraded it to RHL 9, it was too slow, and it was not paging much.

Perhaps you could download RHL 7.3 somewhere but bear in mind that it has
been discontinued for at least a year now, and RHL8 and RHL9 have been
discontinued also.

If you are a home user with a few computers, you sure could turn it into a
firewall (especially since you would probably not run X most of the time).

I just use iptables (interface to the kernel firewall mechanism). I read
the book, "Red Hat Linux Firewalls" by Bill McCarty, and my firewall on my
main machine (that protects itself and my other machine(s) is similar to
the one in Chapter 10. While _Red Hat_ is in the title of the book, the
important stuff should run on any recent Linux distribution.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 18:25:00 up 2 days, 7:44, 4 users, load average: 3.23, 4.06, 6.59

Danny Kile wrote:

> I have an old PC laying around doing nothing, P2 233Mhz, 192MB Ram.
> Thought I would play around and learn something about Linux, question is
> this what is the best and free version to download and where is the best
> place to get it? Also, after getting Linux installed I would like to
> turn the PC into a firewall with a couple of spare NIC's, I have laying
> around. What is the best firewall software and again looking for
> something free.
>
> Thank you for any responses in advance,

You can try LiveCDs like Knoppix and Mepis
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

They boot up from CD and run without installing
and try out different distros.
If you want to install to hard disk,
you can run QtParted, create an ext3 partition
and install - with Mepis its easy - it has installer.
With Knoppix you need to open a console window and enter
sudo knoppix-installer

You can either turn these installs into firewall, or
get a dedicated distro for it like IPCop which is
a CD installer. http://www.ipcop.org/

Danny Kile wrote:

> I have an old PC laying around doing nothing, P2 233Mhz, 192MB Ram.
> Thought I would play around and learn something about Linux, question is
> this what is the best and free version to download and where is the best


.... mandrake.
--
<< http://michaeljtobler.homelinux.com/ >>
Don't let people drive you crazy when you
know it's in walking distance.

On Sun, 02 Jan 2005 19:09:22 -0600, mjt wrote:

> Danny Kile wrote:
>
>> I have an old PC laying around doing nothing, P2 233Mhz, 192MB Ram.
>> Thought I would play around and learn something about Linux, question is
>> this what is the best and free version to download and where is the best
>
> ... mandrake.

I use Mandrakeon my main machine and like it very much. On a slower
machine I'd seriously consider Vector Linux <www.vectorlinux.com>. I have
this running quite well on a 133MHz 586 with 80 MGb, on the OP's machine
it will fly quite smoothly.
--
Mark South: World Citizen, Net Denizen

In comp.os.linux.setup Jean-David Beyer <jdbeyer@exit109.com>:
> Danny Kile wrote:
>> I have an old PC laying around doing nothing, P2 233Mhz, 192MB Ram.
>> Thought I would play around and learn something about Linux, question is
>> this what is the best and free version to download and where is the best
>> place to get it?

There's no best, still amazes me that this question is asked at
least a few times every day. It depends on your experience and on
what you want to do with it. With a little knowledge you can turn
any Linux distro into whatever your goals are. The question is as
curious as the ever annoying "Any ideas?" you read under every
second post with one or another problem these days.

>> Also, after getting Linux installed I would like to turn the
>> PC into a firewall with a couple of spare NIC's, I have laying
>> around. What is the best firewall software and again looking
>> for something free.

You don't need anything, a state-full firewall is part of the
Linux kernel, the user-space tool to maintain it is called
'iptables', as Jean-David already wrote.

> I am not sure this is a good suggestion. I ran Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a
> slower machine than that (Pentium 166 with 256 meg RAM), and it was OK.
> When I upgraded it to RHL 9, it was too slow, and it was not paging much.

> Perhaps you could download RHL 7.3 somewhere but bear in mind that it has
> been discontinued for at least a year now, and RHL8 and RHL9 have been
> discontinued also.

Hi Jean-David!

Wouldn't suggest something EOL as RH 7.3. You could turn the box
into a fairly fast system, installing Debian (Sarge) even with
KDE 3. I'm still amazed by the performance of Debian on older
systems compared to recent rh/suse/etc, Debian runs circles
around them.

Sure for a firewall there's no need to run/install a GUI at all,
but since most people asking here are only used to point&click a
GUI would help for sure.

If someone has used firewall1[tm] GUI tools he'll like
*fwbuilder*, a google search should show up more.

[..]

--
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)
mail: echo zvpunry@urvzvat.qr | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/'
#bofh excuse 261: The Usenet news is out of date

In article <10th118g31ogh64@corp.supernews.com>,
Jean-David Beyer <jdbeyer@exit109.com> wrote:

>I am not sure this is a good suggestion. I ran Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a
>slower machine than that (Pentium 166 with 256 meg RAM), and it was OK.
>When I upgraded it to RHL 9, it was too slow, and it was not paging much.

The question is, what was so slow about it?

Was it only the GUI that was slow? If so, you can try alternative, less
resource-hungry GUIs. Were command-line tasks slow as well? If so, which
ones? CPU-bound ones, disk-bound ones, network-bound ones, what?

Most likely there is a performance bottleneck in one small area of the
system, not the whole RH9 distro. So the trick is to find it and try to
fix it.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> In article <10th118g31ogh64@corp.supernews.com>,
> Jean-David Beyer <jdbeyer@exit109.com> wrote:
>
>
>>I am not sure this is a good suggestion. I ran Red Hat Linux 7.3 on a
>>slower machine than that (Pentium 166 with 256 meg RAM), and it was OK.
>>When I upgraded it to RHL 9, it was too slow, and it was not paging much.
>
>
> The question is, what was so slow about it?

When the box had 64 Meg RAM, it was too slow because of high paging rate.
I ordered 2 sticks of 128 Meg RAM to replace it, and they came in one at a
time, so I ran it with 128 Meg RAM for a while and that pretty much cured
the high paging rate (even with X and whatever desktop -- Enlightenment?
-- came with it). But it was still too slow; just not as slow. When the
other 128Meg Ram stick came in, I installed it, but it made little
difference, less than 2 pages per second, sometimes much less.
>
> Was it only the GUI that was slow? If so, you can try alternative, less
> resource-hungry GUIs. Were command-line tasks slow as well? If so, which
> ones? CPU-bound ones, disk-bound ones, network-bound ones, what?

I did not research that. I gave the machine away. I now am down to two
machines, and that is enough. When that box ran RHL 6, it worked fine with
64 Meg RAM. When running RHL 9, it was too slow even when the excess
paging was cured with 256 Meg RAM.
>
> Most likely there is a performance bottleneck in one small area of the
> system, not the whole RH9 distro. So the trick is to find it and try to
> fix it.

Fine if that is your hobby, or if someone is paying you. I have work to do
and did not want to waste the time.

--
.~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
/V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939.
/( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org
^^-^^ 06:20:00 up 4 days, 19:39, 3 users, load average: 2.22, 2.31, 2.23

In article <33rkdrF43gcaoU1@individual.net>, mjtobler@removethis_mail.ru
says...
> Danny Kile wrote:
>
> > I have an old PC laying around doing nothing, P2 233Mhz, 192MB Ram.
> > Thought I would play around and learn something about Linux, question is
> > this what is the best and free version to download and where is the best
>
> ... mandrake.

HAH! I installed Mandrake 10.1CE on a 233mhz with 256MB. Even with
using ext2 instead of ext3 and icewm instead of kde, it's slower than
molasses. Not to mention that CUPS says it has a driver for all 3 of my
printers, but none of them work. And, oh yes, I had to change video
cards because my Diamond Viper wasn't supported.

I'm going to fuss with it a little more, but I suspect I'll eventually
just chalk it up to experience and get either Vector or Slackware.

Mandrake may be great on fast (and new) hardware, but it sucks on the
kind of machine the OP and I have.

--
Homo sapiens is a goal, not a description

Larry Blanchard wrote:

> Mandrake may be great on fast (and new) hardware, but it sucks on the
> kind of machine the OP and I have.


.... mandrake is traditionally known as a distro that
is easiest to install for newb's. unfortunately, i find
it a bit buggy compared to other distros.

there are so many distros out there that it can be
difficult to say, in general, which is best. you have
to consider the knowledge the user. when someone comes
out here and asks which distro is best and they provide
no details, i assume they're as winders type and a
person with no Linux background.

suse is good too, but they only have a live-cd. mepis is
a good one - it's a live CD and is easily installed to
the hard drive if you choose. fedora is a mess - i'd never
steer a newbie to it. debian? no, i'd NEVER recommend that
to a newb, considering its gross installer. gentoo,
slackware? no. so where? mandrake
--
<< http://michaeljtobler.homelinux.com/ >>
Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.