Which distro (for pxe server) on old Athlon II X2 250

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

Ok, so I bought Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2 with Athlon II X2 250 for a reasonable price. I want to use for a learning project and testing 10GbE :smiley:.I would like to use it as a temporary pxe server.I hope to recreate server in a VM later. Im setting up home 10GbE LAN .I have all the hardware and Im going to install all operating symstems. ll servers and pcs have 10GbE nics which support PXE booting so I hope that it would speed up the things. As Im a linux noob I need some advice which distro would be most suited for the job and easy enough for me to start dealing with linux. Im not planning to run it 24/7 so I wouldn’t like to spend any cash on it . Hardware spec:

  1. motherboard- Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2
  2. CPU- Athlon II X2 250 ( I can upgrade if its needed and if on ebay for a reasonable price )
  3. Ram- 8 gig or 16 if I need it later for other projects
    4)NIC - CHELSIO T420-LL-CR (2x sfp+, has hardware offload if it works)
    5)Storage - 2x 1tb WD dlacks ( raid 1?) and Intel dc s3500 300GB

All advice on is welcome!

2

It would all depend on what you are more familiar with, I had a similar motherboard and Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint and Centos all ran well. Ubuntu Server would probably be the quick and easy way to jump in. Fedora Server would be another way in as well.

3

I personally run Debian stable on all my servers, but if you are looking for something a bit simpler you could install Proxmox which gives you a web UI for virtualization, containers and monitoring. Plus Proxmox is open source and based on Debian so you can still SSH into it and do whatever you want.