I recently installed linux on a really old computer I found in the back room of my house. It has an 83 Mhz Pentium overdrive processor in it. It isn't good for much these days, so I thought I could turn it into a number cruncher with BOINC. However, when I install boinc, it doesn't work properly. It gets to the line that says "Running CPU benchmarks. . . ." Then sits there for a few minutes. Then it says "CPU benchmarks timed out." And repeats over and over. Is BOINC incompatible with my old CPU? It wouldn't surprise me, but that would mean I might as well junk that old computer.

I think for the BOINC client your 83Mhz (weird number, by the way? is it properly recognized in BIOS?) Pentium OverDrive processor might just be a little out of it :)
But you could still use it as a nice webserver? I keep an old box like that for website development (running Linux with Apache, PHP, MySQL, that sort of stuff).

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I have it running on a PII 300, but it choked on a PI 120.

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It is a sad sad day when someone takes your spoon away from you...

In response to some of the answers I have gotten so far:
Yes, 83 MHz is definitely a wierd number. The overdrive processor is essentially a hacked original pentium designed to run in older 486 motherboards. The 83 comes from the fact that the processor uses a wierd clock multiplier (2.5 I think. . .not sure though).

Thats mildly disapointing that you don't think BOINC will work. . .but I suppose I can use it as a webserver or router too. Thanks for the help.

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In response to some of the answers I have gotten so far:
Yes, 83 MHz is definitely a wierd number. The overdrive processor is essentially a hacked original pentium designed to run in older 486 motherboards. The 83 comes from the fact that the processor uses a wierd clock multiplier (2.5 I think. . .not sure though).

Thats mildly disapointing that you don't think BOINC will work. . .but I suppose I can use it as a webserver or router too. Thanks for the help.

I think you should be able to use that computer. But it will take some
tweaking.
I am currently using the BOINC 4.43 version for linux.
First the benchmarking in BOINC ought to be fixed. First
it seems if you are running a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel it gives NaN
(not a number) as benchmark result, third, if your CPU is too
slow you get the benchmark-timeout, and then the benchmark
is restared... (forvever?)

This can be fixed by adding the --skip_cpu_benchmarks
option to boinc. The option --allow_remote_gui_rpc is probably
also what you want.

Next problem is memory size. I think the current limit is 64 MB which not all
these old computers have. If you dont want any graphics etc, the
seti@home client will run ok in only 16 MB of memory, 24 should be plenty.
(I have a 386SX w 16 MB running it, not more than 1-2% idle due to swapping)

This can be done by crafting your own /proc/meminfo giving sufficient
numbers to make boinc happy. I think this is easiest to do by running boinc
chrooted, mount the proc filesystem somewhere else than /proc and
providing symlinks for all but /proc/meminfo

But this is rather messy, so It would be much better
if there was a switch to ignore the memory size check.

Third to run it on a 486 or lower you may need the kernel patches
to emulate some of the newer 486/pentium instructions.

/Thord.