A friend of mine recently acquired 2 old servers that are made by HP. They were made in approximately 2004.
They each have 2 dual core Xeons. I do not know the model numbers. I think they both have 20gb of ram but only 8 is usable because the systems are x86.
He is trying to install Linux onto them to run a Minecraft server. He has tried every version of Fedora all the back to Fedora 8 and cannot find a distro that works with the hardware of the server. He also tried Ubuntu, Win XP, and CentOS.
They both have 6 130gb hdds that he plans to run in Raid 0.
I think one will be the main server and the other will be for testing.
Any help on how he can get them working would be very helpful.
Old things like that... try Debian on them. If that doesn't work, there is something wrong with the hardware.
There is no benefit in installing older versions of linux OS's, if an older version worked, a newer version would even more certainly work.
I'm not entirely sure that the running costs/performance ratio of these servers is very good, they use a lot of power, make a lot of noise, but won't perform particularily well.
Are you sure they are x86? Xeon servers were 64bit before any consumer 64bit systems came out (The ones from AMD were first in that area), and before the x86_64 systems compatible with both 64bit and 32bit. That would also explain the 20GB of ram..
From that era, they're not likely dual cores (unless you are seeing 8 threads), they're single core with hyper threading. (4 threads)
What are the machine models as some do have some stupid limitations.
But anyway, look at PAE to allow access to the rest of the memory.
As for the RAID config... don't do it. One drive goes, the whole lot fails. The hardware controllers in those old HPs are more than capable of running RAID 5 at full speed.