Hello. New to AntiX, but getting fairly comfortable with Linux since resurrecting an old HP. I've tried a few lightweight distros like puppy, dsl (ugh), unity, browserlinux and finally came across AntiX. I've gotta say this is my favorite so far, though I will probably need a fair amount of help getting it"just right" for my tastes.

Nice to be here and now I'm off to try and overload the search function with all my questions!

Hello Okiipapasan:
Welcome to Antix! Go ahead and post questions. Someone will try to help.
Regards,
Pedro

Howdy and Welcome okiipapasan. You are at a nice place here. We are a helpful bunch. I aint no expert. But I will help when I can. Good Luck with AntiX. By the way. I run Puppy to.

Thanks for the welcome, guys.

I've managed to find most of what I need so far. There's a ton of good info here. Maybe somebody could suggest a good graphics card for this old rig.

HP 8660C
PIII Coppermine 533MHz
256 RAM (finding a second chip locally was a royal pain. I am too impatient for ordering online, though, lol)
20 GB HDD

If I get this jalopy moving at a decent pace I've got my eye on an old Compaq in my brother's garage. It has a PII with 64MB RAM (pc66 that will be fun trying to find). At least the board can handle 256 MB, but I don't think it will be good for anything past casual browsing and wordprocessing.

WHAT'S NOT: Graphics performance is this system's glaring defect. The HP's unimpressive numbers in this area were due mainly to an integrated graphics chip that relies on the main system memory. As a result, the Pavilion 8660C ran slowly in Quake 3 Arena. In addition, the HP's Intel 810 graphics subsystem--unlike those on most PCs--couldn't render graphics in 32-bit color depth (its maximum color depth is 24 bits). The 8660C also falls short on system expansion: Adding extra cards and drives isn't easy, and the cramped interior makes adding memory and accessing the two free PCI slots and one open, externally accessible drive bay difficult

Now with that said. And I only own IBM and use only the motherboard graphics


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In the Linux Questions thread. A guy says he is using a

NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 256MB PCI

with XP and Slackware. Can't swear it will work for you though.(without some tweaking)

Once I had a PIII 450 MHz with an Asus P2B mobo, which was a really good mobo for its time. If I remember well it had and AGP 1x or 2x slot and I bought really cheap a GeForce 256 (32 MB). That improved the video quite well (using Windows). The only other card that would be better than it would be a GeForce 2 (which was launched next to the 256) but I didn't find at the time or it wasn't so cheap. I didn't look for better cards because they were made for faster AGP slots and weren't as cheap.
Your limitation is the PCI slot but the GF FX 5200 that roky said is much better than the above ones and I believe you could get up to 256 MB video RAM (I just don't know if the system would use it all - I don't understand about these things).

I'll probably try to find a decent 64MB-128MB card. I just want to pep up the system a bit. It isn't used for anything past surfing youtube, checking emails, and maybe some flash gams on Nickjr for the kids.

I must say, I am really happy with AntiX. All the other minis felt like I was sacrificing options fot the sake of saving resources. This feels more like a complete operating system with lots of options and easy enough to configure if you know where to look. I dual boot XP and Ubuntu on my other desktop but may try Antix on it just to see it's performance on a more modern system.