Sunday, October 22, 2006

Recently Acquired a Dell Precision 220, Installed ZenWalk 3.0 on it

Yes, I got a Dell Precision 220 from work that they were going to throw in the trash (along with a Dell 17" CRT monitor). It lacked RAM and a hard disk. I scrounged up some RAM and this was a difficult task, as the system requires RAMBUS. I found 128MB between two chips of RAMBUS, which isn't a lot but it gets the system working. The system also supports SMP but only has one processor at the moment, a PIII Coppermine 650MHz CPU. It is peppy enough with ZenWalk.

Why ZenWalk? Because I've Slackware running on three systems already and wanted to try ZenWalk, which is a derivative of Slackware. It does well.

The system currently has three NICs, which is why I will eventually place it on firewall duty.

I'm trying to score two 1GHz CPUs (the max this system will take), although they'll have to be PIII Coppermines and also be matched. I found one such matching set locally on Craigslist, but have yet to coordinate a meet/buy. I may even put them into my Dell Precision 410 instead, and swap out the 410's 450MHz CPUs to the Precision 220.

I'll keep you informed on how ZenWalk is, as the days go by.

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