What we are installing on
So I recently cobbled together a (sort of) early 2000s PC! What's inside this piece of history?
- CPU: AMD Sempron 2600+
- GPU: GeForce 8500 GT
- RAM: 1 GB of DDR1
- disk 1: 1 TB SSD
- disk 2: 512 GB HDD
- onboard sound and network card
- a DVD drive
The motherboard takes PCI Express cards, which is handy as I had a PCI Express 8500 GT laying around! Old AGP cards are plentiful too, unlike PCI GPUs - most of the time it'll be cheaper to get an AGP motherboard and AGP GPU than a decent PCI GPU.
It takes up to 2 GB of RAM but I limited myself to one as I like making my life harder :3
I also had the disks laying around waiting for a PC to use them and they are ENORMOUS for the period of this PC, so why not install a lot of operating systems? No, I'm totally not installing them out of boredom, it's for testing my software on many platforms!
I thought I would definitely want a Windows system for running games and other old software from the period (a lot of 90s/00s software aged so well) and a modern Unix system to see if this ancient potato can handle some modern things. I'll also add DOS for very old games and low-level experiments and maybe ReactOS, because what's better than an open-source oldschool Windows? Now let's take a look at the operating systems I chose and how to get them working together!
I decided to make a tutorial series about this as getting this many systems working together on a machine this old can be confusing. I split it into 3 parts, 1 part per operating system - the first part will be Windows XP.
Windows XP
I'm a HUGE fan of fres software, almost a zealot, but I can't deny old versions of Windows were designed very well - they didn't use a lot of resources, the GUI was very uniform and customizable, and let's not forget all the software made for them! A lot of it is still usable to this day and well optimized compared to most modern software.
I went with Windows XP as it's a lot lighter than Vista while having more software compatibility than 9x/2000. This computer could theoretically handle up to Windows 7 - Windows 8 requires some newer CPU features.
The Sempron 2600+ CPU is a 64-bit CPU - it could technically run the 64-bit edition of XP, but I went with the 32-bit edition as it has more drivers, is generally more compatible with stuff and might use less RAM on this single-gigabyte PC.
In this triple boot setup, I'm installing Windows first as it automatically overwrites the MBR unlike the other systems. This computer has a DVD drive (like almost every PC in the 2000s), so we're installing from the good old CD.
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First though, we'll be using a Linux ISO to prepartition the disks, as Windows XP installer's partitioning interface is very primitive and Linux fdisk is one of the most flexible partitioning tools I know. The Sempron 2600+ is an early x86-64 CPU and it can actually boot the latest x86-64 Arch Linux ISO!
The Arch live DVD takes a while to load but in about 5 minutes we get to a shell prompt. You don't have to specifically use Arch, but a command-line live CD like Arch, Gentoo or Void Linux will perform better than a GUI one. I used Arch as I had a DVD with it already burned, but Void is genrally lighter and has better 32-bit support if your CPU is 32-bit.