Even lightweight GUIs on a modern linux will be sluggish on that system. I once tested a lightweight Xfce distro on a P3-933 with 512MB and GeForce FX5200 128-bit and it was terribly slow for anything but basic text. For sure you'd need something much lighter than Xfce.

Just make sure your mvp3 board has a switching voltage regulator instead of a linear one, so it can handle the power of a ''modern'' agp card.
But sticking to the 9250 or geforce2mx should be fine in any case, both are very low power cards. i would choose the 9250 in this case.

If you go for a beefier card you can also choose one with a molex connector for power.

When it comes to 3d, even the MX card is bottlenecked by the k6-2+ (but works fine ofcourse).

clueless1 wrote:

Even lightweight GUIs on a modern linux will be sluggish on that system. I once tested a lightweight Xfce distro on a P3-933 with 512MB and GeForce FX5200 128-bit and it was terribly slow for anything but basic text. For sure you'd need something much lighter than Xfce.

I went for the LXDE gui on the Debian 8 os i586 installation. The Geforce2 MX seems to use the usual nouveau free driver and quiet fast. The whole system with frequency ondemand regulation require idle 35W at the plug. I don't know if anyway I can use any features of the modern R300 chip on Linux beside the DVD acceleration. And the system seems to ask 10W more with this.
I don't understand why all the windows seems to resize and move slowly considering these video cards are perfectly supported by the free drivers and should help beside the slow cpu. I undestand any cpu intensive softwares, but moving a window on the desktop should be fast.

Exactly what do you intend to do on this 'modern' PC?

If that involves web browsing to fully featured websites: forget it 😮

The amount of processing any form of Web 2.0 site requires is far more than your CPU can handle in anything near real-time. I have a Dell D430 subnotebook with 1.2GHz Core2Duo ULV CPU (pedestrian by todays standards but lightyears ahead of a K6) which is at the very limit of acceptable browsing - running a barebones Debian with LXDE works fine, but fire up Chrome or Firefox <=56 and it crawls. Firefox 57 (a pain in the arse to install under Debian stable, I might add...) is just about bearable, at least with the built-in ad-blocking set to its most restrictive. The bottleneck is clearly CPU - I have 2GB of RAM and an SSD, neither of which are saturated, but the CPU just hits 50% (old single-threaded Firefox) or 100% (Chrome). FF57 usually manages to stay below 80% total, but once again, that's 80% of two 1.2GHz Core-architecture cores. With 768MB I suspect that RAM would become a problem too, leading to thrashing, but with an SSD the impact of that would probably be smaller than the CPU impact.

My previous sub notebook/netbook (an Acer Aspire One D522 with AMD Ontario C-50 1GHz dual core ULV) got decommissioned for the same reason, CPU bottlenecking web browsing. Once again, despite being low-power and low-end, it's still significantly faster than any K6-2. I really wouldn't even try to do web browsing on a K6-2 unless you limit it to Lynx/Links text browsing, or to Internet Archive copies of old sites.

If you're willing to drop down to a k6 for modern computing, you're likely willing to drop down to text mode browsing for the internet, so that shouldn't be an issue. Of course, you then need to ask, why use a gui for your os at all. It's modern to have a gui sure, but that would rule out text-based web browsing. I guess you'd compromise on that one.

dionb wrote:

Exactly what do you intend to do on this 'modern' PC? […]
Show full quote

Exactly what do you intend to do on this 'modern' PC?

If that involves web browsing to fully featured websites: forget it 😮

The amount of processing any form of Web 2.0 site requires is far more than your CPU can handle in anything near real-time. I have a Dell D430 subnotebook with 1.2GHz Core2Duo ULV CPU (pedestrian by todays standards but lightyears ahead of a K6) which is at the very limit of acceptable browsing - running a barebones Debian with LXDE works fine, but fire up Chrome or Firefox <=56 and it crawls. Firefox 57 (a pain in the arse to install under Debian stable, I might add...) is just about bearable, at least with the built-in ad-blocking set to its most restrictive. The bottleneck is clearly CPU - I have 2GB of RAM and an SSD, neither of which are saturated, but the CPU just hits 50% (old single-threaded Firefox) or 100% (Chrome). FF57 usually manages to stay below 80% total, but once again, that's 80% of two 1.2GHz Core-architecture cores. With 768MB I suspect that RAM would become a problem too, leading to thrashing, but with an SSD the impact of that would probably be smaller than the CPU impact.

My previous sub notebook/netbook (an Acer Aspire One D522 with AMD Ontario C-50 1GHz dual core ULV) got decommissioned for the same reason, CPU bottlenecking web browsing. Once again, despite being low-power and low-end, it's still significantly faster than any K6-2. I really wouldn't even try to do web browsing on a K6-2 unless you limit it to Lynx/Links text browsing, or to Internet Archive copies of old sites.

The pc in my sig below is my only computer and sticking to mobile versions of websites and installing noscript I have very little problem view the web pages I frequent not limited to but including facebook, youtube, msfn, vogons, gmail, and others. Even with multiple browsers, browser tabs, vlc playing a MP4 video system basically idle and rarely breaks into using swap. So I don't think going to the extreme of text based browsers or IA is needed.

clueless1 wrote:

Even lightweight GUIs on a modern linux will be sluggish on that system. I once tested a lightweight Xfce distro on a P3-933 with 512MB and GeForce FX5200 128-bit and it was terribly slow for anything but basic text. For sure you'd need something much lighter than Xfce.

Modern web browsers are particularly bad. The proliferation of "Web 2.0" with heavy JS scripting is poison for performance.

386SX wrote:

I went for the LXDE gui on the Debian 8 os i586 installation.
The whole system with frequency ondemand regulation require idle 35W at the plug. I don't know if anyway I can use any features of the modern R300 chip on Linux beside the DVD acceleration. And the system seems to ask 10W more with this.

dionb wrote:

Exactly what do you intend to do on this 'modern' PC?

That's a good question. This topic is confusing and journals a struggle to do a task with the wrong tools.
If you just want a low power Linux machine, a Raspberry Pi 3 is a great choice. They run Debian and have a huge support community. The power draw is like 2W and it outclasses anything from S7 era. Or Wyse thin clients on ebay sometimes run cheaper but they will draw more power.

Here I am. Basically mine was more a build test to see if I could actually live with an office PC (mail,web,music etc) based on this architecture. I knew modern web would be impossible on this machines, but the original idea was to use some light browser like Midori or Epiphany from the experience with the Raspberry cards. But I already tried and a full Debian 3.x kernel based os, even with LXDE seems to run but it's still really too much for the cpu.
So after Debian I'm trying the good old WinME os. I'm still not sure about the video card. Beside 3D if we consider the best feature packed chip still supporting the 3,3v AGP connection, until which card the system will still benefit from some performance/features?
The Geforce 6200 seems to require too much power on the bus and have problems at boot, so the R300 chips are the best?

386SX wrote:

Here I am. Basically mine was more a build test to see if I could actually live with an office PC (mail,web,music etc) based on this architecture. I knew modern web would be impossible on this machines, but the original idea was to use some light browser like Midori or Epiphany from the experience with the Raspberry cards. But I already tried and a full Debian 3.x kernel based os, even with LXDE seems to run but it's still really too much for the cpu.
So after Debian I'm trying the good old WinME os.

Eek. Don't let that thing onto the public internet. WinME is certainly no faster than a minimal Debian LXDE environment, the difference in speed is in the applications, and some ancient Internet Explorer may be a lot faster than a modern one, but in terms of security it's back in - well - the last millennium, and just begging for being exploited and zombified. And so's the core OS with WinME. If you can find a halfway decent browser you'll notice it's just as slow as with Debian.

I'm still not sure about the video card. Beside 3D if we consider the best feature packed chip still supporting the 3,3v AGP connection, until which card the system will still benefit from some performance/features?
The Geforce 6200 seems to require too much power on the bus and have problems at boot, so the R300 chips are the best?

For mail, web, music etc it should make no difference whatsoever. Only general-purpose consideration is MPEG2 decode support.

I feel the silly modern web is about as demanding as Crysis. Browsers using various forms of hardware acceleration. Multithreading. Gigs of RAM. It's easy to find sites that can benefit from as much CPU as you can get.

dionb wrote:

Eek. Don't let that thing onto the public internet. WinME is certainly no faster than a minimal Debian LXDE environment, the dif […]
Show full quote

386SX wrote:

Here I am. Basically mine was more a build test to see if I could actually live with an office PC (mail,web,music etc) based on this architecture. I knew modern web would be impossible on this machines, but the original idea was to use some light browser like Midori or Epiphany from the experience with the Raspberry cards. But I already tried and a full Debian 3.x kernel based os, even with LXDE seems to run but it's still really too much for the cpu.
So after Debian I'm trying the good old WinME os.

Eek. Don't let that thing onto the public internet. WinME is certainly no faster than a minimal Debian LXDE environment, the difference in speed is in the applications, and some ancient Internet Explorer may be a lot faster than a modern one, but in terms of security it's back in - well - the last millennium, and just begging for being exploited and zombified. And so's the core OS with WinME. If you can find a halfway decent browser you'll notice it's just as slow as with Debian.

I'm still not sure about the video card. Beside 3D if we consider the best feature packed chip still supporting the 3,3v AGP connection, until which card the system will still benefit from some performance/features?
The Geforce 6200 seems to require too much power on the bus and have problems at boot, so the R300 chips are the best?

For mail, web, music etc it should make no difference whatsoever. Only general-purpose consideration is MPEG2 decode support.

I imagined that not being supported and patched there could be problems, but realistically are these old 16bit kernel based os still target for any possible sw bugs out there in a world of arm based linux based machines?

Anyway I try again the Debian way. If i use no gui which possibilities are there to launch gui based softwares? Or i can only use text based ones?

386SX wrote:

I imagined that not being supported and patched there could be problems, but realistically are these old 16bit kernel based os still target for any possible sw bugs out there in a world of arm based linux based machines?

One way to find out...

It's a valid question in fact, but I wouldn't suggest testing too thoroughly unless you have a hotline to your ISP's abuse department (or you have an ISP known not to give a damn about malicious activities). Thing is that the number of Win9x/ME systems out there is very small, but the amount of effort involved equally so. If you're going to crawl the net looking for vulnerable machines, you might as well add some basic 9x/ME exploits in there just in case. I would if I was so inclined 😉

Anyway I try again the Debian way. If i use no gui which possibilities are there to launch gui based softwares? Or i can only use text based ones?

Yes and depends... long time since I dug around that deep, but iirc you can do stuff with fbdev. The biggest problem isn't even the window manager/desktop environment itself but the display libraries, particularly qt and gtk(+). They are the things with the big footprint and one of them is needed for almost every graphical thing out there. But trying to run graphical stuff without a display manager is not exactly default settings. If you're asking the question your level of knowledge and experience with Linux is probably not enough to do it.

One slightly less challenging thing you can do that will have significant impact, particularly on the RAM footprint, is to compile everything yourself with minimal USE flags. Gentoo is the go-to distribution to do this. The big gain is that default apps (i.e. in Debian's package management) generally have support for both qt and gtk. If you choose one and only compile in support for that one, some apps will shrink by over 25%. If you're in a situation where every Byte matters, that makes a lot of difference. Smaller file size also marginally improves I/O and CPU performance, but don't expect miracles from that. I did this once to get Linux installed on a P266MMX subnotebook (yes, I have a bit of a fetish for those things 😉 ) with max 32MB RAM. Took almost two weeks to get the base system compiled though and wasn't going to win any benchmarks afterwards either 😜

Anyway, even a paltry 768MB in 2018 is relatively vastly more than 32MB in 2006. One tip is to go for Firefox Quantum (i.e. >57). The difference between it and previous versions is absolutely huge on pretty much every system I've tried it on. That said. those have all been dual (or more) cores, and one of the big improvements is multithreading. No guarantees on a K6-2+

Reading all this I'd be very tempted to test it out myself. I recently acquired a K6-3+ - but the motherboard to go with it is lost in the mail, last seen in DHL's Köln depot 😢

dionb wrote:

386SX wrote:

I imagined that not being supported and patched there could be problems, but realistically are these old 16bit kernel based os still target for any possible sw bugs out there in a world of arm based linux based machines?

One way to find out...

It's a valid question in fact, but I wouldn't suggest testing too thoroughly unless you have a hotline to your ISP's abuse department (or you have an ISP known not to give a damn about malicious activities). Thing is that the number of Win9x/ME systems out there is very small, but the amount of effort involved equally so.

Considering that I was thinking to build this old pc only to see how good it runs nowdays as office machine (web only if needed), I prefer to have a modern os even if slower instead of risking virus or whatever has not being patched.
So I am already testing Debian 8. Obviously even with a fully supported Geforce2 MX card the whole system lag a lot. Maybe if I find a faster gui than LXDE and I remove some unnecessary software (even if it's already a light one cd version) it will speed up a bit.

I run Beos5 upgraded to nmightly Haiku on my K62+500 wth 512mb ram and G400MAX. (I dont run windows on it). Its sluggish for sure. Remeber too, the problem of caching so much ram. I dont know an MVP3 motherboard that can cache 768mb ram

BloodyCactus wrote:

I run Beos5 upgraded to nmightly Haiku on my K62+500 wth 512mb ram and G400MAX. (I dont run windows on it). Its sluggish for sure. Remeber too, the problem of caching so much ram. I dont know an MVP3 motherboard that can cache 768mb ram

Marginally off-topic, but do you have sound working and if so which card/chip?

I originally intended to run Haiku on my Dell D430, but HD audio with a Sigma Designs codec was a no-go.

sound on my haiku? I think so, its an AWE32 with 32mb ram onboard it. at minimum its detecting it as sound blaster 16 I think.

Update:

I am still trying Debian 8 for this office test machine. Debian up the 8.x version runs with the i386/i586 kernel without the need of the CMOV or PAE cpu instructions. But LXDE gui imho is still too much even with fully supported cards like the Radeon 64MB SDR or the Geforce 2 MX. I imagine that with the official linux driver it could be faster than the free one, I'll eventually try it.
Anyway I switched to the IceWM desktop gui that it seems more Win95 style and a bit more reactive.
I overclocked the K6-2+ 550Mhz to 600Mhz@2,1v and it seems that it really really needed that mhz boost, maybe I'll try the FSB overclock. On the web side, my opinion seems that Epiphany browser as I remember from the Raspberry Pi 1, is a fast and enough compatible html5 browser but seems to crash sometimes; I'm now testing with acceleration disabled and it seems more stable for now; Firefox runs slow but better than I thought. The original installation system/gui seems to freeze (even without overclock and even with a K6-3 400Mhz) sometimes and now I'm testing if it still crash with this new gui or if it doesn't depends on the interface, I don't know which log to check.

I had MacPup running pretty well on a P2/266 with 384MB of RAM & a Radeon 9200SE. It's based on Puppy and about as full-featured as Puppy is (which is impressive for its size & weight!), so it might be a good option for you. It's totally possible to install it to the HDD and just use it as a regular OS which is how I had it set up. You could also try Bodhi Linux which is more modern, but built around a (fork of) the same window manager and also runs pretty well on low-spec hardware. I have Bodhi on a Pentium M notebook with 768MB.