I have some parts lying on my desk and i’m planning to put em togeather to make Blender render machine.
Maybe it is little slow, but with no additional use render times won’t matter so much and other machine can be used for blending and other stuff.
Specs:
celeron 400Mhz or PII266 (does bigger cache make PII faster (i test that))
32Mb (Hmm i have 384Mb in my primary machine and could take 128Mb from there)
TNT2 16mb graphics card
Only 400Mb hard drive
Is there small and easy linux distro for my needs or should i go with M$ ?
I would go for slackware, there you has an easy to set up distro and then you just don’t install stuuf you don’t want, alltough i’m not sure if it’s possible to get out that low, but you shouldn’t nedd that much for a renderstation. Check out zipslack, fits on a 100 mb zip.
Description: This Linux distribution runs entirely from a bootable CD. Data on the CD is uncompressed on the fly, allowing them to fit 2 GB worth of system and programs on one CD, including a complete X server, KDE, and large packages like OpenOffice and The Gimp. Since it runs solely off the CD, Knoppix makes an excellent portable Linux demo or system rescue disk, but its completeness makes it a good general purpose distribution as well.
I’d recommend Madrake Linux 9.2, most user-friendly Linux I know of. I would recommend BeOS too, as it REALLY rocks, but the last blender for it was in the 1.x series
Yes, if you install the configuration packages. I’m running Mandrake 9.1 right now (heard 9.2 is too buggy) (I want gentoo; extremely fast but really techie oriented. Haven’t gotten the time to install yet), and the Mandrake Contron Center whoops.
gentoo is good (its what I use now on all my linux boxen) but yes, very techie oriented (good documentation and community though, and a fair amount of new users seem to get it going)
debian and slackware- a bit easier to use, small installs possible with both.
Mandrake is very easy to use- and last time I checked you could stay away from gnome and kde and get something lite.
Suse is good, but you almost need KDE (and hence a big install ) to really use it.
Redhat I’ve always found to be a bit of a pain in the arse.
I’ve never tried lindows or xandros. Knoppix I’ve tried, but never the HD install.
I’d stay away from any recent windows for that box- (NT-2K-XP) and the old ones just plain suck.
I’d say your best bet is a minimalistic debian or slackware install, or (perhaps) Mandrake.
I installed W98se to check everything works fine, but it take half of HD so it must go, if i recall right W95 is less than 100Mb. Does blender work fine with W95?
Is there any Linux distro u haven’t mention ?
I think i’ll try knoppix, mandrake and slakware atleast to see how those fit for me.
Well i think i need windowmaker so it is easyer to make small tweaks between renders(when i make testrenders) of course when rendering final commandline is way to go.
If BeOs was still in list of supported OS it would be my choise
Blender does work with Windows 95, but you won’t be able to use the scroll wheel to zoom in and out. As a middle mouse button, it still will work, though, but I’m fairly sure that you have to install a driver that supports the third button.
I think the PII 266 will probably be faster, but you should test that; I’m not that sure.
I tested prosessors yesterday
In my test scene rendering time with PII266 was ~7.10min and C400 ~4.48min so celeron is faster.
I only wish that my mobo had oc abilities so i could make that PII faster, atleast every single PII266 that i’ve had was pretty easy to oc.
Multiplier unlocked down downwards so 3*100 is possible eaven with standard voltage and it is faster than C400 (tested in past)
C400 is such pain in ass to oc
Currently i’m hunting little larger hd and my friend promised to check if he have 1.3Gb lying somewhere.
Not sure how much hard drive space NT4 needs, but I still think going for a nice lightweight linux distro will be the best solution. If you network the linux box to your main machine, then you won’t even need a monitor for it, just remote log in, launch blender from the command line, then job done!
There is a damn small linux distro called, funnily enough,
Bit of a pain but if since it sounds like your’e going to network this box, have you considered doing a network boot? I’m assuming you have drive space (or linux) on another box on you’re network, but its possible to network boot a linux box that doesnt even have a hard drive of its own. The more of the OS you can store on anther box, the more virtual memory (swap space) you’ll have for textures, etc.
