Recycling an old machine for gcompris - part 2

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, here is part 1.

Well, after numerous badblocks attempts, I’ve seem that badblocks was tricking me. I first thought that some block of the hard disk were dead. But in fact, it was only parts on the previous display that weren’t deleted. The disk was ok after all.

Then I tried to install Mandriva 2007 on the machine. Well, it finally was a pain in the ass. Installation is sooooo much longer than expected. I wouldn’t have never thought a Celeron 366 was that slow, because my first Mandriva install was Mandrake 9.1 on a Pentium II 350. My Celeron experience is definitely more painful (but the distro is bigger, so the proc is not the only one to blame).

I then have understood this fact: GNOME will be too heavy for this machine. So I tried another install, in text mode, and installing only the base system, without X. I then think of configuring my urpmi media to install XFCE. It’s a pitty Mandriva doesn’t support this environment out of the box (it’s available in the contrib media, not in main).

So I now need to connect that machine to my network to be able to install XFCE. Maybe the best way to go at first was a net install… I don’t know. But I hope XFCE will be light enough for this old machine.