I have an old Compaq that I am turning into a file and print server. It is 366mhz with 64m of ram. I am new to linux but I have Redhat 9 installed now and it runs godawful slow. Would 128 be enough for my purposes? I am alos having trouble getting Blackbox loaded. I get an error everytime I give the "./configure" command. Does the download need to have be decompressed in a specific folder or what might I have done wrong? Thanks, Aaron

Why would you run X for a server with those tasks? A bit more ram and a more powerful video card should increase X's performance.

I guess I'll be disabling them once I get the server setup, I am trying to leanr the OS in this process. If I were not running X, would I still need more ram just for the serving?

The amount of Ram and CPU speed are more than enough. If you want your system to be a dedicated file server, you might consider a SCSI hardisk when it's too slow in accessing files. But that all depends on the performance you want. You could consider installing and experimenting with Linux on a faster computer and when you have figured out how to get the system the way you want it, then install it on the compaq. Could be less frustrating. I guess it's not really necessary to "learn the system" with a X running. Although it LOOKS more easy. What errors do you get after giving the configure command? A lot of people who just start out trying linux seem to forget that it sometimes is useful to look in the directory /var/log (as root/superuser) when troubleshooting. It won't help you with the "./configure" problem, but I think it won't do any harm in mentioning it.

You are probably getting an error in the ./configure portion because you don't have the necessary development packages installed. Did you install them (or did you do a complete install of the distro)? No? You need to do one of these before you can compile as it's likely that ./configure is setting up for a compilation. Good luck.