So about a day ago, my friend who works at a university was throwing out old tech and junk and asked me if there was anything I wanted from the pile. It was mostly old Cisco switches and Linksys routers, but there was one thing that looked interesting was a tower server with the motherboard and processors in tact. No hard drives sadly, but I have my own so no big deal. Anyway, I've never worked with a server before so I was wondering what Linux distro would be best for an old dual processor server from 2002?
It has 2 Gigabytes of ram. 2 Xeon 2.40Ghz processors No SATA only IDE cables for hard-drives A VGA graphics card 2 Ethernet LAN ports and a 56k modem
I know it's not practical by today's standards, but I think it's something I could learn on. Any ideas for an OS distro to use are welcome. Pic unrelated, just something on topic
It's really impractical, you might as well just buy an Orange Pi PC for some 20 bucks, but this one looks like it had a windows server running on it, as seen by the graphical interface.
If you have no experience with linux or servers, you could try installing an Ubuntu 14.04 server, or just try anything that doesn't come with systemDicks
Cooper Hernandez
I have experience with Linux, just not servers in general. I figured it had Windows Server 2003 on it, so I want to try installing that but It doesn't have an optical drive.
Hunter Thomas
servers are not much different. The main problem for you is what you want to do with it
Cooper Garcia
Debian should be fine.
Gabriel Turner
I dont know, probably try making a BBS or FTP server or something like that. I guess I'll start with SSH and work my way up.
Jayden Thomas
That's more than enough even for the latest, flashiest, most mainstream distros like Mint. If you want something truly light, Puppy can run with a 500 MHz processor and 128 MB RAM. Some less extreme picks are Peppermint, Lubuntu, or BunsenLabs.
Jaxon White
this
Ryan Allen
Devuans even better c:
Oliver Miller
Is there a reason to use it if you don't mind systemd or even prefer it?
This. Gets latest security patches within a day of them being released I have been using Arch 18 months now and had no problems.
Ethan Moore
Alpine
Luis Collins
Sure, but it also gets all other updates that quickly, which really isn't that suitable for servers. Debian Stable also gets security patches quickly, and it only gets those, so you don't have to babysit your server as much.
Camden Richardson
my home server is Pentium 4, 3GB ram, running on ubuntu 16.04 LTS server edition, text mode only
Running:
Adrian Perry
I came here to say this, but I knew would come up. It's just a pet project so I don't think using a distro like Arch is too much of a big deal. Personally I would use it to get comfortable with Linux is a server environment, I recommend OP use whatever distro they're most comfortable with as well.
As far as distros I actually do use on my servers, that'd be CentOS. I don't really like it, but when I was young, I was told "that's just what you do" and it's stuck with me ever since, and I'm quite used to it now.
Nolan Roberts
CentOS Debian Trisquel OpenIndiana or SmartOS if you're feeling super fancy.
