I have an older PIII450 I’ve had lying around that I decided to install Mandriva on. I’ve delved a bit into the linux world before, but it’s been so long that I can’t remember squat. Luckily I have the one page linux manual.

The install was pretty easy actually. If you follow the directions you can turn a windows machine into a dual-boot linux machine. One thing: Make sure you install the development tools. You will probably need them at some point to compile software for your distribution or a new kernal. The install took about 25 minutes, but as soon it was done everything worked fine, and the computer was capable of its primary task: surfing the net.

Right after install I had some issues with how sluggish the ol’ pIII was running using the default KDE GUI. After consulting the guys at the BBr Unix/Linux forum I decided to switch to fluxbox, which is a variation on blackbox. The fluxbox site had a package to compile that I had problems with because I was missing “x windows” development stuff. Eventually I brokedown and used an RPM(basically a self-installing file) that someone on BBr showed me at http://www.rpmfind.net .

This was all a good warm-up for the new system I just put together. Sometime this week I have to update the nvidia drivers, and install RTCW:ET.