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Proper Linux for Compaq Proliant 2500

Roland Huisman

Roland Huisman

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Mar 24, 2011
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In the late nineties I've installed several Compaq Proliant machines at the University where I worked back then. Because of the warm memories I wanted to have such a system for myself. The Proliants which I installed were from Pentium 75 up to quad Xeon (450MHz?) systems. I really liked the look of the systems and the hot swappable SCSI disks.

A while back I found this Compaq Proliant 2500 with two Pentium Pro CPUs @200MHz and 512MB of memory. It has all the looks, the display and the swappable disks. Good enough for me.

IMG_20210220_231502.jpg IMG_20210220_231741.jpg IMG_20210220_231735.jpg IMG_20210220_231726.jpg IMG_20210220_231755.jpg IMG_20210220_231847.jpg IMG_20210220_231910.jpg IMG_20210220_232001.jpg IMG_20210220_232542.jpg

Back in those days I installed these systems mostly with Windows NT or Banyan Vines. I would love to do an installation of Banyan Vines again, but it seems to be impossible to find media for it. So I will skip that.

So now I think the most convenient OS would be a Linux version. But what is the latest I can run on this system? Back in the nineties I played with Redhat 5.2. But I wonder if the Smart SCSI array controller is supported at these Linux versions.

I hope someone can help me with a few suggestions on this (not so?) vintage system...

Regards, Roland
 
May I suggest you try DSL Linux 4.11.RC2. While this latest version is over 8 years old at this point (and sadly there don't seem to be any more releases in the works) two 200MHz Pentium Pro CPUs paired with 512MB of RAM should give you excellent performance. I've booted into DSL with a Pentium 100 and 8MB of RAM with the OS running at a decent speed, and apparently DSL can even run on a 486 (maybe I should try that with my Epson ActionNote one of these days).

Another recommendation I have is Tiny Core Linux. I've never used it myself, though like DSL only requires a 486 paired with 46 MB of RAM. Best part about Tiny Core is that unlike DSL the OS is still under active development. Version 12 was released three days ago.

While not a Linux distribution, Visopsys may be worth a try as well.
 
I like Slackware on old boxen, but whether or not the most recent releases will run on a 686 machine entirely depends on how much RAM you can stuff into the thing. I run older Slackwares on 486 class boxen.

As far as I know the only reasonably mainstream current distro that will run on extremely old boxen is Gentoo, but it appears to be a real pain in the butt to get going on old stuff, as the compilation is glacial, as you can imagine. I have never tried that, though, as for my purposes an out of date release of Slack or Debian tends to do just fine for what I want to do with these machines.

The only real advice I can give is, max out the RAM, then look through the system requirements for the various releases of the distros you like and pick one that will run on your box. Give yourself some breathing room. For example, Slack 14 will technically run on my 486 with 100megs, but it doesn't have enough free memory to do much, and it is *extremely* slow, with a lot of swap-thrashing if you try to do much more than just run a shell. Slack 12 still takes forever to boot, but it runs fine as a console/screen box once it gets around to finishing booting.

Also, if you like your modern Linux to still be Unix-like under the hood, I very strongly recommend Devuan Gnu/Linux, which is basically Debian without systemd. However, it is too new to run very well on anything with less than 512megs; although older Debians will do the trick in that case and still be systemd-free.
 
If you use Linux, make sure you use the SCU to configure the BIOS so it is in "Full Table" or Intel MPS compliant mode. (if you don't have it in the BIOS, you may need to get some old Compaq SmartStart CDs)
 
Thanks a lot for all the tips and suggestions! I will try to get it up and running.
All the batteries on the RAID card are still okay but I had to replace the bios battery
on the motherboard. I replaced the old battery with a CR2032 socket and battery.
I have Smartstart 5.5 with the machine, so I can configure the machine and RAID controller.

I forgot how heavy these beasts were... 33Kg (73lbs) :workout2:

Regards, Roland
 
Hallo Roland,

I have Suse 7.1, maybe 6.1 and also a very early one, 1.2 (???) on CDs. I can make copies or images and put the last ones on my site.

Groetjes, Ruud
 
Nice! I could have had a PPro-200 2500 some years back, but passed due to size and such. I kick myself now for not getting it, the PPro's are fairly scarce now. Not to mention the HP Vectra XU 6/200 with PII overdrive a friend got rid of a few years ago that I didn't hear about until afterwards...

Good luck with your project, sounds like a fun one! The 2500 I mentioned was originally owned by a business I used to work for, and it ran NT4 server back in the day.

Wesley
 
Hi Wesley,

The machines I installed back in the days were often NT4. That worked pretty reliable.
It even mentioned the amount of CPUs at the start :D Those were the days...
Too bad you can't do much online activity with it any more.

Regards, Roland
 
A 2.4.x Linux kernel would be best for that machine. My recommendation would be Debian 3.1 Sarge, for which you can use it's on-line official repositories (so that a basic CD-install would be all you need to get going).

I have a Pentium-II laptop running such Debian with 256 MB RAM (no GUI), and it works flawlessly.

These is my "/etc/apt/sources.list":

Code: 
deb [URL]http://archive.debian.org/debian[/URL] sarge main contrib
deb [URL]http://archive.debian.org/debian-backports[/URL] sarge-backports main contrib
 
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