switching away...

[Troy Engel]

Mike Rice wrote:
> 
> machine is a Dell gx110, 750p3, 256MB RAM, USB & decent video, good
> enough for most apps.

The ethernet (3c905c compatible) and sound (SB awe64 compatible) won't
be any problem.  That onboard Intel i810/812 video chipset is touchy,
you want XFree4, not 3, in order to save yourself a serious headache. 
BIOS stores the clock in GMT/UTC.

I've done RH62, 71, and Mandrake 8 on this machine ('cept a P833) with
no problems except for that !@$%$# video chip.  There's no way to
disable it in BIOS (only "auto" and "onboard" choices), so if you have
an external card (many gx110's had a nVidia TNT2 option add-on) your X
setup will not be so simple.

I'm a fan of VMware, works well for me. I can't wait until the 3.0
release with USB and >2gig support. Oh baybee.  I prefer using virtual
disks and installing Win2k from scratch into them, many less headaches
than trying to use raw disks.  The trick is to completely fill up the
2gig virtual disk (after primary OS install) with some dummy files, then
delete them all. This will grow the actual physical file on disk to
2gig, and make your Windows faster (per se) as it doesn't have to grow
the file with everything you do.  *Then* install all your other junk,
and you don't wait for years for it to work.

-te

-- 
Troy Engel :: KeyID DF3D5207
I killed a process today, just to watch it die.