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Hi,
I know that this has been covered time and time again, but I've searched and searched and still feel confused about it all.
I have a
Pentium 133,
32mb RAM
1.2gb HD,
cdrom (with boot from cd capable bios).I want it to be my webserver, to run PHP and MySQL, and preferrably be installable from a boot CD. That's it. I then want to unplug all the computer's peripherals, and control it remotely once it's up and running.
I've heard talk of apache webserver, slackware, mandrake, SUSE, FreeBSD, debian and suchlike, but don't want to leave my PC downloading for 3 weeks to get some 10 gig distro that I'm only using 1percent of.
So is there a distro out there that caters just for webserver use and supports PHP and MySQL (even if I have to download those modules separately) and is, say 200mb in size so I don't have a beard by the time it's finished downloading, and won't crash on bootcd install cos it has some gui install interface that needs min 64mb ram?
I've got a copy of Redhat 9 on cd but the machine won't boot it from cd, also have the mini install of the latest freeBSD, but there's the same problem.
Oh and if there is a distro that would suit, what version no. should I look at getting?
Thankyou Very Much!
If you just want to run httpd and such, then Slackware is a good choice! The latest version comes in two CDs but the second only contains mostly KDE, Gnome, and some extra stuff. Therefore, you can install it from the first CD! I'm assuming that you don't want X on that system since you have a limit amount of RAM... Damn Small Linux is another choice!
taurus
0 
DUDE,
DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT USING LINUX!!!
I had your same idea about 2 months ago when
i was told that linux could be used as a web
server. I went out and wasted $80 on suse
linux pro. Then i found:
www.cablewebserver.com
this site shows you step by step how to set
up a webserver using windows without
spending a dime on stuff like server
software.
-jake
0
Dude, how stupid are you? You can download Slackware and other Linux distros for free and if you want to make your Windows into a webserver, don't you have to pay for Windows first!!! HELLO...
taurus
0
I personally would suggest using FreeBSD. (Please don't flame me) Its much faster than linux while not using X. X is a little unstable compared to linux in it however. The only reason I don't use it to this day is because ATI hasn't released OpenGL drivers for the radeons for FreeBSD like nVidia has.
0
Well I won't flame you then ;) - I'll just point out this:
http://www.infoworld.com/infoworld/article/04/01/30/05FElinux_1.html
and this:
http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/
If you've got some data that shows that FreeBSD is in fact faster than Linux (under some particular circumstances perhaps?), then I'd be genuinely interested to see it. You may be right but there are options such as a Gentoo stage1 build with a suitable 2.6 kernel or the aa-sources - which I think includes the in-kernel TUX Web Server - which _any_ other OS is going to find very, very difficult to beat.
0
NickyG, have a look on www.linux.org under distro's they may have what your looking for. otherwise Redhat Fedora is fairly easy but windows:( is easier.
jake, go post on the windows lists.not sure if freeBSD is faster than Linux or not but if you wan't to run a webserver go and look at the top 50 uptimes on www.netcraft.com. every single server is BSD running Apache except for a couple of FreeBSD machines.
0
Yes and having looked at the uptime top 50, go and look at this:
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/accuracy.html
and note the 497 day limit, not to mention the unmeasured 2.0.x series before you draw any conclusions.
0
Wow, thanks so many responses.
I ended up going for peanut Linux because it has a 340mb download size which contains xitami webserver, php and mysql, all included.
It's been three days in the world of a windows user....
In that time I've managed to realise that KDE isn't going to work on such a low spec so I'm using the text console. I used DOS a lot in the past so felt a bit cocky that this would be a breeze..... yeah...
I think mysql works. I'm too scared to approach Samba for file sharing so I'm making do with FTP to administer my php files that I develop from my windoze machine. Vaguely getting used to Xitami webserver - the remote web based admin is probably good for those who have a clue what they're doing. Latest trouble is that PHP doesn't give me error messages when I have mistakes in my web pages, plus it refuses to deal with $_POST[] variables. Tut.
I'm going to press on with this thing because Linux seems a lot faster plus I don't care to know what the license deal is on using windows as a server. But I'm surprised at how hard this is turning out. I suppose it's just a high learning curve. Thanks for all the support tho.
Cheers,
NickyG
0
You'll find you have a lot more power with commandline based *nix than you ever had with dos. On such a low spec machine you're probably right to go this route, especially considering the machine's main purpose.
If you want a bit more flexibility administering your new webserver, you could run an sshd server on it rather than an ftp server (sshd includes an ftp service). You can run a client like putty on your Windows box enabling you to run mc,vim,emacs and any other programme you like. Putty is very good (at least the gtk client is - I haven't tried the windows one) and it includes the psftp client if you want to upload your files from your Windows box.
0
There is also a windoze app called WinSCP which is a nice GUI explorer-like frontend for SSH file transfer (SCP and RCP).
If you set up authentication keys for SSH you don't even need to log in, I transfer files between my linux machines with one command like:
$ scp host:/path/to/file /destination/directory
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