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Linux Software

Linux on Older Hardware 268

Posted by michael from the double-speed-cdrom dept.
sparrow_hawk writes: "One of Linux's strengths has always been the wide variety of older/obsolete hardware it supports. However, most modern distributions seem to assume that the user has a brand-new machine with processor and RAM to spare. Linux Journal reports on the RULE project (Run Up2Date Linux Everywhere). They are trying to come up with a low-resource-requirement, easy-to-use Linux installation for use on older hardware, intended as an option when you install Red Hat Linux. The FAQ has more information."
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Linux on Older Hardware More

Linux on Older Hardware

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  • I think this would largely benefit users everywhere. I personally am sick of the growing install size of RedHat, as much as I love that distro.

    My old P233 can only take so much!
  • I'd imagine that the most streamlined versions of Linux would always be the custom or application-specific ones anyway. (example: freesco)

    After all, the goal of the big distros is to be a good desktop OS with the power of Linux. It might not get as bad as windows, but it's trying to provide the same functionality (or better) and so these things take resources.

  • I dont get it (Score:4, Funny)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @04:21AM (#3017180) Journal
    The why is RULE distributed on DVD?

    (-;
  • Though I'm sure I'll just be one of many posting in support of this idea, it's important to chime in, so congrats!

    The only real question for me is whether this distro is planning to do any work towards including old hardware that never got supported.

  • ummm (Score:2, Insightful)

    by SonofRage ( 89772 )

    Why not just use Slackware or Debian? Both have text-based installers and they let you choose which packages you want and don't want. I don't get it.

    • Because it is difficult to decide what you really need and what you don't. This is why RH has a 'workstation' and a 'server' configurations with different applications. Sure you can mix and match and the installer gets most of the dependencies right, but if that basic config has been done - it saves whole lot of time.
      • I've been using Slack '96 on a 386/25 with 3 Megs of ram and an 84 MB hard drive for years... no X, but I had gcc and the like. I've been wanting to upgrade to glibc, but it's a shame that glibc's devel .a libs are so huge... (libc5's are like 400k.)

        On my glibc 2.2 system:

        ls -l /usr/lib/libc.a /usr/lib/libc_p.a
        -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 24897006 Jan 21 15:16 /usr/lib/libc.a
        -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 25013472 Jan 21 15:16 /usr/lib/libc_p.a

        See what I mean?

    • The last time I checked (1 day ago), Red Hat allows for a text-based install and package selection.
      • Neither Redhat7.2 nor Mandrake8.0 allow you to install with less than 32M of RAM, regardless what packages you think you want. Selecting text based EXPERT mode does not help. I ended up having to install RedHat6.2 in that situation, which was a great distro when it came out, but now it's out of date. I really like iptables, for example.
  • This reminds me of when I first heard of Linux, way back in 1993 when I was on CompuServe, using the new NCSA web browser for the first time in Win 3.1.

    In the page I read on an academic web site, it described Linux as a principle of reusing old hardware with better software, which was odd because it missed the whole open source community thing.

    I am glad to see that older hardware is going to become widely supported in commercial distributions instead of having to roll your own.

  • Limitations? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Graelin ( 309958 )
    While it is great that I can run Linux on my old packard smell 486sx[33mhz] w/ 4 megs of ram. I have often wondered if I'm loosing out on my high end servers because of this legacy compliance?

    I admit, IANAKH, nor have I seen assembly code in over 6 years, but it seems to me that the kernel might be going out of it's way in some obscure (to me) way to support these platforms? Have CPUs not really changed all that much? Is one kernel source for all CPUs the best approach?

    I understand that their are compiler options applicable depnding on your CPU, but is their legacy code that could be removed to make a leaner, meaner, faster(?) kernel?
    • While I'm not really qualified to answer your question properly,
      I can point out that the beauty of being able to compile your
      own kernel is you can select the processor for which to
      optimise, and you can also turn on or off things that
      newer architectures support, such as high memory and
      MTTRs. If the kernel didn't have support for these things
      at all, then yes, you would be being hampered by "compatibility".
      Since these things are selected at compile-time, you can include
      them with no performance loss.
    • That's why there's kernel configuration and Aunt Tillie just might want to compile her own kernel. There's options in there that are essentially guaranteed to wreck you system or crash hard.
      ... your high end servers? You have more than one z90?
    • Code that will run on a 486 will almost definitely run on a P4. Same architecture, just cracked the hell out. The only difference is the OS and the additional hardware (RAM, HDD, etc). Consider the difference between a Power Macintosh 7100 and a Power Macintosh G4. There are two BIG differences- the 7100 has SCSI and a good amount of motherboard ROM. The G4 has IDE and the "MacOS ROM" is dumped to the HDD with the OS install as opposed to being actual chips on the motherboard. In damned near every other respect, the G4 is, to my "I edit video and do web design, and study this as a hobby" perspective, fundamentally identical to the 601 on a base level. Yeah, there's Altivec, and some pipeline alterations and so forth... and it's faster (whoo! is it ever faster...)... but it's the same thing in many ways... much like a housecat is in many ways fundamentally identical to a cheetah.

      So in a roundabout way, things have been ADDED to a processor, not changed or taken away. The things you may want to REMOVE support for would be things like SyQuest drives, SCSI (if you're using IDE only), and things of that nature. If you're running on older hardware, drop USB, Firewire, and all that jazz. Heck, if it's a SERVER, drop the GUI and all of the related toys- your software can be very easliy customized to run with or without peripherals, ports, adapters and expansion cards, but it's ALWAYS going to need a processor... and like the header says... x86 is x86.

  • Tough Choices (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nurightshu ( 517038 ) <rightshu@cox.net> on Saturday February 16, 2002 @04:27AM (#3017193) Homepage Journal

    Interesting that this was posted tonight -- today I was poking around my parents' basement (aka, "Free Storage for Me," or in German, "Krappenhaus"), and I discovered a wealth of old equipment I'd...um...creatively obtained from my high school and various jobs over the years:

    • A Zenith Data Systems Z-100 486SX, 8MB RAM, 120MB HDD. The first PC I had a CD-ROM in!
    • Serial mice out the wazoo.
    • A Compaq VGA monitor.
    • Two old Labtec CS-800 speakers.
    • A keyboard (huge-ass AT connector...or was it XT? It's been so long...). I think it was putty-colored at one time, but all the keys are black and shiny smooth now...ewwwww.
    • A shitload of old DOS games -- Sam and Max Hit the Road, X-Wing, Maniac Mansion II, Rebel Assault. (yeah, I was a LucasArts fan. Wanna make something of it?)

    The only problem is deciding whether or not I want to turn it into a Linux box (SOHO firewall, anyone?), or take advantage of all those classic games by installing FreeDOS [slashdot.org].

    Damn you Slashdot. Who would have thought that you could have too many choices for using a 486?

    • I'd have to use the machine for Sam and Max, defnitely.

      If only to visit "Bosco's Guns, Liquor, Baby Needs" one more time. (I hope I got that somewhat right. There are too many tidbits in that game to remember all at once)
      • If you've still got any lucasarts games that your wanting to play again under linux or windows, then you could do worse than checking out scummvm [sourceforge.net] which is an interpreter for them.

        Worked like a charm on Day of the Tentacle!
    • Do you mean Krippenhaus?

      Oh, and I run a Slackware 3 on my 386SX25 Notebook with 4MB Ram and 80MB HD. Couldn't run the 2.4.x Kernels so far.
  • There is much confusion in the Linux community over the fact that the Linux architecture is well-suited to run on older hardware. Many (such as the submitter) seem to think it is a design decision that is fundamental to the very concept of Linux. However, as Linus and other have stated many times in the past, good performance on older machines is only a side effect of the Linux community having developed a modular, streamlined system based on the proven UNIX paradigm. It is purely incidental that Linux performs well regardless of the hardware it is run on.

    And that brings us to my point: making software compatible with older hardware shouldn't be a goal in and of itself. Why? One need only to venture over to Pricewatch to see that an AMD 1800+ mobo/CPU combo sells for under $300. Systems faster than what anyone could ever need are commodities now. The only people who need Linux to run on old hardware are the Luddites who refuse to part with their old equipment, and they are nothing but an albatross around the neck of the Linux community. Let's face it - we all need to grow up, evolve, and keep up with new developments. We can't let our programming skills atrophy for 2-3 years and expect to pick up where we left off, so why should we all be bending over backwards to support machines that were made in 1996? The industry changes and it's time for us all to realize that our skills, our paradigms and mindsets, and yes, our hardware too must change.

    Mr. Uptime

    • I agree Linux should not be held back to make it usable on older hardware... but assuming everyone has $300 to blow on a new motherboard/proccessor combo is a pipe dream. I am a college student in the bay area, everything here is expensive. Yes I saved up for a 1GHz box that is sitting under my desk, but I do my school work on that and there is no way I am going to experiment on a production machine and lose my school work.

      So what do I do?? I dig out or scrape up old boxes and that is what I play with, I tried loading up RedHat a few weeks ago and watched it crawl on this 200Mhz I have. I am a T-Com student after all.

      Don't hold linux back to insure its use on older hardware, but if some people want to get together and spend there time to make it work then don't down talk them. I personaly will be keeping an eye on this project and hope it works. I mean isn't this what Open Source is about anyways? let them make it, and let users decide if they want to use it.

    • Re:Linux isn't "Free as in Cheap" (Score:5, Insightful)

      by cosyne ( 324176 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @04:50AM (#3017237) Homepage
      AMD 1800+ mobo/CPU combo sells for under $300

      But the PPro 200 hanging on my wall at home was FREE. As in beer. Which means i could run something like RULE on it to serve the approximately 2 hits per month to my personal web page and use the $300 to buy more beer. The point is, people shouldn't have to spend $300 just to have a decent system while perfectly usable hardware is ending up in the dump.

      The only people who need Linux to run on old hardware are the Luddites who refuse to part with their old equipment, and they are nothing but an albatross around the neck of the Linux community

      It's not like writing less bloated code is a bad thing. Crapping out code that does stuff is not hard. If Linux was just a bunch of bloatware kludged together to barely work, it would require a lot less effort. (Hell, it'd probably be done.) The hard part is designing a good system, and that benefits everybody.

      • It's not like writing less bloated code is a bad thing. Crapping out code that does stuff is not hard. If Linux was just a bunch of bloatware kludged together to barely work, it would require a lot less effort.

        I think you're right. Trying to work with an old 486 or Pentium 1 with 16 megs of RAM will illustrate your coding weaknesses very quickly. It'll make you pull out unnecessary loops, pull out arrays held in memory needlessly, find better/faster algorithms, and so on. We had an app that did a sloppy recursive database query and it took 20 seconds even on fast servers. Switching to a join required some hard thought from 3 people about how to get it right, but the response time now is nearly instantaneous. Maybe one-tenth of a second. And anyone who has played with Perl knows that foreach will read a file into memory, bogging down the system if it has to swap, but using "while" will fix the problem. Simple coding fixes are possible and can give very real, visible speedups. I don't believe that bloat is necessary -- often it is just the result of a developer doing it the obvious way instead of the way that requires someone to sit down & mull it over for 30 minutes.

        And don't forget that the Unix way -- one of the catch-phrases that attacted me to the platform -- is "small tools dedicated to single jobs." We're different from Windows in that regard, and that's good. It's attracts people to the platform.

    • Re:Linux isn't "Free as in Cheap" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Cryptnotic ( 154382 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @04:53AM (#3017244)
      I can't tell if you're a troll or not, so here goes:

      Older machines generally run cooler than the newest Athlons and P4's. If what you're looking for is a reliable machine to be a firewall, dns, router, print server, etc., then you want reliability. Ever seen a HSF die on a 1GHz+ Athlon? The machine will crash. Hopefully, the CPU will still work once you replace the fan. I've had the HSF on my old PPro 166 go out twice. The machine just keeps running. Oh yeah, it's actually a 150 overclocked to 166. And it's perfect as a firewall router machine. Before I tripped over the power cord, I had an uptime of 158 days. Before that, it was something like 109 days.

      Anyway, the new systems are almost entirely the same from the software's point of view. They still use 32 bit PCI and 16 bit ISA buses. Yes, even if you don't have ISA slots, there's still an ISA bus there on the "south bridge" for the serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard port, mouse port, etc.

      Access to memory is the same for a P4 as it is for an original Pentium. The instruction set of the processor abstracts access to memory. As long as you can compile a kernel that doesn't use P4-specific or Athlon-specific instructions, then you can run it on an old Pentium (or even an old 386, which is what Linus designed it for, IIRC). And as long as you can compile a kernel that disables drivers for devices you don't have, then you'll be able to use it on an old machine.

      Cryptnotic

    • The only people who need Linux to run on old hardware are the Luddites who refuse to part with their old equipment, and they are nothing but an albatross around the neck of the Linux community.

      I agree that the type of compromises that people have to make to make software that runs well on older hardware are sometimes less than ideal; things like memory protection, true security between applications, and a nice fancy GUI user interface take system resources; in order to program so that less user resources are used, one either had to give up stability (look at the stability of Windows 3.1 or MacOS from the same era) or user interface (The days of the TWM X user interface).

      That said, there are legitimate reasons to have older computers. I remember talking to a technical support rep who had just spent nearly an hour helping a customer run our software on a system with only two megabytes of ram (this was early 1996; 16 megs of ram was the norm; 32 megs of ram cost $350 at the time). I asked him "Why didn't the customer buy more memory?" His reply: "Because she was a single mom." This lady, after feeding her kid and paying for the babysitter, plain simply did not have the money to upgrade her computer.

      Another example: Foreign countries. I was recently in Mexico, in an area where the economy was thriving because people earn a whopping six dollars an hour at a Volkwagen factory down there. Now, six dollars does not seem like a lot to the average American. With $20,000 houses and $3 meals at nice restuarants, however, that six dollars can go a long way. One thing that does not change price is computing hardware; in fact, computing hardware actually costa little bit more, thanks to a 15% sales tax (IVA) which Mexico has. I am sure these people would appreciate anything they can do to not have to spend a lot of money on (to them) expensive computer upgrades. (Since labor is cheap, people who finally need to upgrade their computers take their computers to shops where people do motherboard swaps and what not).

      Another example is students on universities living on student loans.

      Also, from a programmer's perspective, it is often not that difficult to make sure the code runs fine on older hardware. Simpler software, in general, uses less hardware resources.

      - Sam

      • Good post, but I'd just like to point out that you mean 'developing countries' not 'foreign countries' - the latter includes Europe and Japan, where people are quite able to afford the latest hardware...
      • That said, there are legitimate reasons to have older computers. I remember talking to a technical support rep who had just spent nearly an hour helping a customer run our software on a system with only two megabytes of ram (this was early 1996; 16 megs of ram was the norm; 32 megs of ram cost $350 at the time). I asked him "Why didn't the customer buy more memory?" His reply: "Because she was a single mom." This lady, after feeding her kid and paying for the babysitter, plain simply did not have the money to upgrade her computer.

        I live in Panorama City, CA. It used to be considered part of Pacoima until the end of World War II and new towns were carved out of old farmland in the San Fernando Valley. The area covered by The City of San Fernando, Mission Hills, Pacoima, Panorama City and Arleta is not a hardcore ghetto like South Central LA, but it's not Beverly Hills either. Lots of struggling Latino, Black and Asian immigrant families (Thai and Filipino mostly) who are trying to make ends meet. Do their children have computers? Not many.

        The Digital Divide will not be breached when these children can go to the Library or the computer room at school and wait in line for their 15 minutes to look up a reference or two. The Digital Divide will only be breached when these children have their OWN COMPUTERS. Period.

        While we prattle here about how "Linux should not be held back in order to support creaky old 486en" let's consider these facts: 1.) There is now a project afoot to use prison labor to dismantle computers discarded by big corporations; 2.) These computers are usually IN WORKING ORDER; and 3.) These computers could be used by kids who need them.

        Windows is NOT the answer...it is actually a goodly portion of the problem. Remember that group in Australia who were visited by the jackbooted thugs of the BSA because they dared load old computers with Windows95? And that's an OS that Microsoft stopped supporting on 12/31/2001! FreeDOS could provide part of the answer, particularly in tandem with New Deal [newdealinc.com]'s office and internet suites, but that costs too. Linux could be the entire answer, if someone would take the time to create a basic distro for older PCs.

        What Red Hat is doing is not enough. There needs to be a simple, lightweight distribution, of more substance than Freesco and Coyote Linux but DEFINITELY not bloated like the major distros. We're looking for the happy medium here and I don't mean Miss Cleo. It's not a SEXY project. But it's needed. It might even give you some Karma points in Heaven or whatever, because dammit, it's THE RIGHT THING TO DO.

        Once upon a time Linux ran contentedly on 386en with 4MB of RAM. It can be done. Let's do it again.

    • I'm willing to accept some of your point, but I'm grumbling a bit. I just got back from looking at a friend's Celeron 1300 (128 MB RAM) Gateway, in which it took 20 seconds from the time I right-clicked the WinXP desktop to the time the right-click menu appeared. I don't want Linux to become that way, just because you expect all of us to pull $300 out of our asses on a whim, with case, power supply, fans, and possibly more yet to go.

      I have a general rule of thumb about programs: If they run quickly on slow machines, then they will run like lightning on fast machines. It would be nice to not have disk-space bloat, too, at least until PC makers give up on the MHz game and bundle the latest version of Ultra/SCSI for our IO needs. What's wrong with that?

      Until I get my 3D virtual-reality UI and all of the other whiz-bang features that were speculated in the previous decade, I'll grumble that the glibc2 devel package is larger than the rest of my installed Slackware packages combined. For all of the technology that is supposed to make programming easier, it just seemed to make programmers lazy. Okay, we have our C++, Java, COM, CORBA, SOAP, .NET, etc., blah blah blah, but where are the results that are so extremely different and so superior to 1995-era software that I should need a 2002-era machine to run the programs well?

    • Re:Linux isn't "Free as in Cheap" (Score:5, Informative)

      by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @05:34AM (#3017316) Homepage Journal
      I have just accepted a donation for my school district of 32 Compaq Proliant p166 systems. Now should I fork over the cash to microsoft for 32 98SE licences or should I install my copy of Redhat 7.2? I really like this article. I have rescued over a hundred machines for my schools and children that would otherwise never have a computer. I'm using Linux because it is free as in cheap. There is a guy like me in every school district. Some are Macnazi's, some are MCSWannabE, and some, like me, depend on linux supporting old hardware. I have introduced well over 1000 kids in the past 3 years to Linux. They go home to their Macs and winboxes but a few come back and ask me to burn a copy of Redhat for them. For their old boxes. "And by the way do you have any cd drives" they ask. "My computer doesn't have one."

      I think I'm doing the right thing.. but then.. I'm a Luddite and nothing but an albatross around the neck of the Linux community
    • You are obviously not unemployed with a very limited income. As a computer enthusiast with very limited money I pick up bits and pieces when possible, just the other day I got a 10G hard drive for my old 166, and because it's Linux, the kernel deals with it :-)

      There is also the market for recylced computers, plently of people pick up computers which range from 486s all the way to the dizzy hights of 166s.

      Do you want these people to have to use Win95? That's what they get installed on them, and it would be good to offer a Linux alternative.

      As a side note, recycle computer places can be great for picking up pieces of hardware which shops can't supply, old ISA network card, different types of memory ect
    • (Yes, I know I'm responding to a troll...bite me. :-) )
      And that brings us to my point: making software compatible with older hardware shouldn't be a goal in and of itself. Why? One need only to venture over to Pricewatch to see that an AMD 1800+ mobo/CPU combo sells for under $300.

      True, but if that system is extreme overkill for the task at hand and you have some old bits that you can lash together into something that will get the job done, why not take advantage of the capability?

      I needed to set up a print server at work not too long ago. I threw together a system using nothing but junkbox parts: a 486DX2-66 on a VLB motherboard, ISA VGA card and IDE controller, a couple of ISA NICs (it needs to handle jobs from two networks), 32 megs (or was it 16?) of FPM DRAM, a 340MB hard drive, an AT minitower case with power supply, and a downloaded copy of the latest version of Slackware (hadn't installed Slackware on a machine in ages, but it seemed appropriate here). A couple or three hours later, it was up and running. The next day, it took an hour or so to set up print queues and get all the machines in the office set up to print to it.

      Total cost to get it running? $1.00, and that was for a CMOS battery from the local surplus shop [computersu...outlet.com] since the NiCd on the motherboard wasn't keeping a charge. The print-server boxes you can get for $50 won't do what this server does, and why should I have blown upward of $500 on even a "low-end" computer that would've been way more than what was needed?

  • The most bloated linux distro will still be faster and more stable on older hardware than any current MS OS.
    • Not necessarily. IMHO, many of the Linux distros (Red Splat, SuSE, Mandrake) are in a race to the bottom where the first to become M$ Window$ wins. All of 'em have these fancy installation and maintenance tools (YaST, etc) that turn your shiny new Linux box into a bloated, resource-hogging convoluted mess. Edit your /etc/rc.conf? Nope, gotta change that in /etc/YaST/foo/bar/cluster/fsck and /YaST/foo/goo/cluster/. Oh yeah, don't forget to run /etc/SuSEConfig when you're done.

      As for me, it's bye-bye Linux, hello OpenBSD!

      Mild /. anti-Linux comment? mod = -1, karma = NULL;
  • Uh, simple UNIX Rules...

    1) use optimizations for your specific hardware in ALL compiling (thus, why Mandrake is resonably popular).

    2) Simple, get ONE FAST AS SHIT BOX, and hang terminals off it... (old schools knows what I'm talking about, but for the kiddies, read http://www.ltsp.org)
  • Mod me down for saying this or whatever (it probably will, everyone who comes here seems to have some story about their 386 running a http server since the civil war), but it will probably take them a good year and a half to get this project to completion. According to Moore's law, processor speed will double.

    A recent article posted here (forgive me if I don't remember the date) talked about this exact issue. A company delayed release of their wordprocessor to fit on a 5 1/4 inch floppy, standard at the time. But no one uses it anymore, and it turned out to be a waste of time and money.

    Best of luck, but don't say I didn't warn you.
    • One quick note on Moores law... the MHZ myth.. A 1 gig Atholon doing real time video processing benchmarked at only 17% faster than a K6-3 500mhz. This is hardly a doubling of processor speed. You need to take into account how many clock cycles it takes for a single process. If the 500 takes 2 clock cycles and the 1gig takes 3 the net gain is not a doubling of speed. This unfortunately is what is happening. Although the MHz is increasing on the box the number of cycles per command is also going up, although not as fast. Besides how many clock cycles does it take to teach a child how TCP/IP works? or how to use a spreadsheet? If having the 1800XP makes you feal good... go for it. Frankly as I travel a lot, I prefer to use older and outdated notebooks. They may be heavier but I don't worry about getting a 400 dollar 166 stolen as much as I would a 2500 dollar Viao. (and boy howdy they do get stolen) Yeah a Ferrari may be able to do 200mph but in a 25mph zone a Focus is just as fast.

  • Kernel 2.4 on 386s (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @04:36AM (#3017206) Homepage

    There are a couple ways to get a modern Linux on your old 386 right now, although getting Red Hat to de-bloat would be very cool. I still use 6.2 on some old laptops because it was a nice, stable release, sorta modern apps, and works fine with 16 megs of RAM. But also look at Vector Linux [ibiblio.org], which has a 386 & 486 optimized distro with a 2.4 kernel & lots of small recent apps. You can get it on CD too. And also Small Linux [superant.com], which will run in console mode in as little as 2 megs of RAM, and will do X-Windows with just 4 megs of RAM. The Small Linux kernel is only 2.0, though. But it's very cool to give someone an old 386 laptop with a Web browser, basically restored to some minimal usefulness.

    By the way, if you check out Small Linux, you may notice that the home page talks about a .75 release. But you'll find a .81 release available for download. It's definitely improving (my first try with this distro & it just wouldn't even work, but now it actually runs if you're able to follow the instructions carefully).

  • seems to me that anyone who is comfortable enough setting up a linux box to work well is able to only install appropriate software. my house is masqueraded behind a 486 gateway which runs in 90M of hard disk space. kind of a pain during setup, but efficient usage of vintage hardware is always a pleasure.

  • Why low-end hardware.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Slashamatic ( 553801 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @04:49AM (#3017235)
    Some people aren't getting the point here. The old 486s are the Gas Guzzzlers, using lots of space and power and generating even more heat and noise. Do you really want to run it?

    Give it away!!!!!

    There are entire countries with very few computers out there. There are plenty of places around with reasonable power (nothing that a filtering UPS can't handle) but few PCs. They would love to have the latest and greatest but if they get a good old 486, they would be quite happy as long as they can use it.

    Sorry, it won't un XP and you can't legally buy 95 for it or Win 3.11. This is where a mini-Linux can be particularly useful.

    So they have to create their own software? No worries, man-hours are cheap there (I'm not being sexist here, women hours have a greater real value as they have to do all the hard work).

    • I dont get what your point is....

      "There are entire countries with very few computers out there...if they get a good old 486, they would be quite happy as long as they can use it...man-hours are cheap there "

      Really, this reaches a level of stupidity, I mean where is this place...man hour cheap...for what...porting linux on older machines wont be the priority, even if the man hour are cheap, and really... no one can Love to have an old 486, which cant run windows..except for some nerd who cant afford a P4 and risk experimenting with it..thank you for being considerte for the poors...but they would like to have clean water and food rather than an old 486 that cant be cooked

    • >Some people aren't getting the point here. The old 486s are the Gas Guzzzlers, using lots of space and power and generating even more heat and noise. Do you really want to run it?

      Funny, none of my 486's ever needed a water cooling system, or for that matter even a CPU fan. Noise yeah, space mostly because at one point I was using the power supply from one case with all the bits installed in another, except the extra HD that didn't fit in either. But for the record, 99% of the time Caldera 1.3 (with a 2.0.something kernel) ran quite nicely with X in 16 megs. The other one percent, of course, while running Netscape or KFM, it would swap-thrash for like half an hour at a time. Reboot!

      As somebody who's usually riding the trailing edge of the PC market, I'm glad somebody's looking past the planned obsolesence trip and doing something useful with older hardware.

      (Ob my-l33t-box-brag: 300mhz AMD, 32mb ram, 20gig hd, and stop laughing, it's impolite.)
    • Um, in Central Asia, a 486 is still quite useful. Sure they have the basics, but it is the stupid stuff like accounting that gives problems. Many enterprises do not have one single computer!!!!!
    • A 486 has more computing power than the computers that went up in the first space shuttle, so you can still get a considerable amount of use out of it, so long as you don't any games newer than Quake.

      The old 486s are the Gas Guzzzlers
      In comparison to what brightness of light bulb?

      There are entire countries with very few computers out there
      You can't get the uneaten food on the plate to the starving kids somewhere else. Computers are a bit more durable, but the mechinisms to get them overseas aren't there. However local charities could make use of them in your local area.
      So they have to create their own software?
      Or adapt something that is open source. which would be more valuble in another nation, a closed source accounting package that has stuff for the US tax system, or an open source one that can be modified for local conditions?

      One tactic that I think should see a bit more use is the computing model of the early 90's - loads of low end machines running X and a few high end machines to run the intensive stuff. The office apps qualify as intensive stuff, and have more or less killed that model. I've got no idea why X windows isn't used more in education - I can only put it down to a lack of skills.

  • From the poor ($) hobbyist viewpoint... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by solios ( 53048 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @04:55AM (#3017252) Homepage
    ...Linux kinda NEEDS to run on old kit, and run reasonably well. By "well", I mean at least as snappy as whatever OS is actually designed to run on the thing, to an extent. I wouldn't expext X to be as snappy on a Quadra 650 as MacOS 7.6.1 (hell, it's not all that snappy on a G3).... but I'd like the draw rate to be measured in FPS instead of blinks of the eye.

    I bring the Quadra up for good reason- I'm a Mac user. (stop laughing, and read.) I don't have a system that runs MacOS X well enough for my needs (this include my G4/733 at work, to be blunt... it's a slug compared to "classic" MOS). My home systems and my work systems are all task dedicated.... but I have that Quadra to mess around on.

    Old hardware can be had for VERY cheap. And it's a BITCH to find an old OS for old hardware (want to run A/UX as your firewall? Good luck.....). Linux and BSD offer an excellent opportunity to run a production-grade OS on outdated consumer-grade hardware. A lot of both respective systems will run acceptably on just about everything... until you hit the GUI- at which point it seems to be an ordeal similar to that of amatuer web designers... you know, the cats that don't even have Netscape installed and don't even bother to test in the browser revision below whatever they're using now. It seems to me that a lot of OSS programmers whose work is getting into Gnome, KDE, and other graphics-intensive areas of a Linux-based OS are designing ON modern hardware FOR modern hardware. They don't seem to realize that not everyone - particularly those who could benefit the MOST from their work- has access to or owns modern hardware. And of those that DO... not all of them are willing to SPARE that modern hardware for the weeks/months of the learning experience.

    Old hardware is cheap... I'd LOVE to see OSS programmers approach their hobby/love/job the way GOOD Web designers do- test early, test often, test on hardware, connections, and media that's at least a revision older than what you're using to code. It's effort- something not a lot of people are into- but you want to see your widget run as smoothly on mom's Pentium 100 as it does on your G4, right?

  • NetBSD baby! (Score:5, Informative)

    by arcade ( 16638 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @04:56AM (#3017254) Homepage
    I'm not trying to start an OS-flamewar, but seriously. NetBSD supports almost every piece of hardware out there. In addition, its a Very lean and mean distribution.

    Its also quite easy to recompile the entire baby (if you've got enough diskspace, of course). It would take time on a 386 though.

    Point is, there _is_ a free unix available that installs in almost no space. And, that unix is _great_. :)

    (Note: FreeBSD might be more optimized for i386, but that distro has gotten a bit too bloated imho. at least compared to NetBSD :)

    • Gimme my NetBSD baby! (Score:4, Informative)

      by BadlandZ ( 1725 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @05:46AM (#3017338) Journal
      You are SOOO right. FSKing bastages script kiddies that run the Mods on SlashDot now days will never mod you up, but lemme tell you, _I_ believe ya!

      NetBSD runs on EVERYTHING, with more packages, more complete, LONG LONG LONG before ANYTHING else (backhacked that is). Linux is not a step or two behind NetBSD, it's MILES behind when it comes to porting.

      For that matter, IMHO, Linux (although it's almost the only UNIX I use now days) _STILL_ doesn't get "porting" the way the BSD community does. Make an app compile given a set of general expected things you expect to be there, and it COMPILES, and it RUNS.

      Way too many Linux programmers think "if it compiles on Mandrake and on Debian, it's portable!" &*#*(@!&(*@!

      ONLY NetBSD will get X running on the box you drag out of the closet and brush the dust of to read what it is.... Atari? MacSE? That wasn't my furnace, that was a PDP11? NetBSD is your friend.

      OK, maybe X is a stretch, but, still, don't diss the dog that sniffed the trail!

  • Oh yah, this comes out "now"... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KlomDark ( 6370 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @05:05AM (#3017267) Homepage Journal
    Last month, I spent about three days on a project where I was DETERMINED to get Linux running on my old 386sx/25 Mhz box. It was a total bitch!

    But - I succeeded!

    This poor box, with all of 16 megs RAM (and a kick-ass swap file!) is now running:

    - A CircleMUD-based MUD (telnet klomdark.servebeer.com port 4000)
    - A Citadel BBS (telnet to klomdark.servebeer.com)
    - Apache (With some cool stuff listed here... [servebeer.com])
    - A Mailserver (both SMTP and POP3) (Email me...)

    It CAN be done, but this distribution would have sure come in handy! But, an old copy of RedHat 7.0/i386 worked just fine, once I actually located an ISA network card that it knew how to deal with :) )

    Insane installation - took nearly 16 hours to install it. Nearly 4 hours to compile Apache. Probably 8 hours to compile Citadel, and another 8 to compile CircleMUD. (I would have thought Apache would take the longest...)

    • Damn! I'm nearly getting slashdotted! :) I guess my girlfriend is really attracting a lot of interest! :)

      The poor 386 is swapping to death, but seems to be still keeping up. :) Nearly 2000 hits since I posted that! Even hits from .au!! Pretty cool. How's the performance from outside my local network? Slower than molasses, or OK? OK for a normal server or just OK for a 386? I know the MUD is way fast, some very efficient code, but not sure of the rest.
      • running tail -f /usr/local/apache/logs/access.log and just amazed at how fast the hits are coming in!

        Complete geek excitement on my part! Never been "slashdotted" before. :)
      • Here's the top part from TOP on the poor thing:

        4:30am up 18 days, 8:06, 3 users, load average: 1.08, 1.11, 1.22
        61 processes: 60 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
        CPU states: 28.3% user, 26.4% system, 0.0% nice, 45.1% idle
        Mem: 14608K av, 14012K used, 596K free, 17016K shrd, 352K buff
        Swap: 66488K av, 15000K used, 51488K free 5336K cached

        Kewl :)
      • And I did get asked this question: What's with the .asp files (/ROTFOH and /MessageBase)??

        Those, I am simply using Apache's proxy module to reverse proxy to an NT server on the network, so the NT box (a 233 Mhz Pentium I with 128 megs RAM) is doing most of the work on those.

        Sorry, didn't mean to deceive anyone. Everything else besides those two directories/apps is running 100% on the 386.
  • Producing a modified RedHat sounds like a good idea. But it seems unlikely that the work will ever be merged back into the standard distribution. Red Hat explicitly does not support hardware below the minimum requirements, and I don't think they'd be interested in taking on that burden. Maybe the project could persuade RH to include older-system bootdisks in an unsupported/ directory on the CD, but I wouldn't expect anything more than that. Why should Red Hat spend effort modifying their installer for low-memory machines when doing so won't do anything for their target customer base? Similarly, why bother to build a kernel with support for older hardware when this would just be dead weight on the machines they do support?

    Good luck to the project, but I think they'd be better off working with some distro like Debian where there is a sizable number of developers willing to make the extra effort to support old hardware.
    • I've been waiting on someone with common sense to make this point. RedHat is primarily (AFAIK) geared toward servers, which will generally be the latest and greatest hardware. No offense to anyone here, but highly-caffienated hackers living in their parents' basements (myself included) probably aren't high on RedHat's priority list.

      That said, check out Core Linux [sourceforge.net]. I did an install on an old P133 with 32megs of ram last week, and this distro was well suited for the job. It's a little rough around the edges, but if you're willing to put in a little time with it it beats RedHat hands down for older hardware. As their slogan says "Simply put, no crap", it's the bare minimum stuff to get you up and running linux. The good thing is you get up to date libs, gcc, and other components in a compact distro, as opposed to what you'd get if you installed a 1996 version of slackware.

      One word of caution, they don't include a "starter" kernel, so before you can be running you'll have to either compile your own (which could take a while if you do it old hardware), or scrounge up a compatible one from somewhere else.

      Shayne


  • from:

    http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/rule/todolist.ht ml

    RULE PROJECT todo list

    FIRST: Find the guy who already did it!!
    I already asked on some Red Hat list about a smaller anaconda, less than one year ago. Some guy came back saying he had done it (squeeze anaconda in less than 32 MB) but that it wouldn't give the code, because the result was so crooked that even he himself didn't know anymore how it worked, and that I had to do it personally, rather than blindly copy somebody else's work, otherwise I might just screw up the whole thing. I have already tried to scan the archives, without success so far. Let's keep trying.


    So let's try to help here eh? Who in the slashdot community knows this guy?


    I for one am dying to get my mitts on this thing, so I'll do some trolling on the google cache. But maybe the person who did it is reading right now...


  • Isn't this another reason why source-based distros like Gentoo [gentoo.org] or Sorcerer [wox.org] should be given more consideration?

    Surely a distro that compiles to your specific hardware during installation would solve this problem.

    Or am I missing something extremely important?

  • Related info for Mandrake & SuSE (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @05:16AM (#3017289) Homepage

    Also in the "works on small/old computers" topic, both SuSE and Mandrake seem to have some activity in this area. It's nice to see them listening to customers a little bit. I buy their boxed products, and really, really want them to speed up & shrink down. Check out my Usenet post about installing SuSE 7.3 on a 32 meg Pentium 1 [google.com] (summary: it hurts, but it's possible). And for Mandrake, check out this Slashdot article about Mandrake's upcoming super-super-minimal install. [slashdot.org]

    This kind of stuff is near & dear to my heart -- I have spent hours upon hours trying to squeeze installs onto old 486 laptops, mostly. Partly I wanted to learn Linux, but mostly I was just indignant that Windows would install & run okay, so I got very interested in making Linux compete. If you get any Linux working on old boxes, please please please document it somewhere that Google will find you. I'm constantly searching Usenet & the Web for other people's installation experiences.

    • C'mon guys, Slackware [slackware.com] does and did it all the times. No, I am not starting a distro war (again), but when it comes to chronologically advanced hardware, slack is still the best you can get. I got a dozen or so 486SX running a customer's sites doing DHCP, DNS and routing. Off-the-Shelf slackware. With just some 20MB of harddisk...If you don't want a bloated system, don't buy a bloated distribution!
  • What will minimum install size be? i know redhat has swelled to something like 250meg with NO packages selected. Which seems slightly boated to me.

    The larger size makes it harder to scale down to something to be embeded.

    I rember installing redhat 5.2 on a old486 HP with 16meg o ram and a 100ish meg hd. Now its well nearly impossible. that 486 wouldnt take 6.x.

    I think this could be a step in the right direction, if they play their cards right, for making linux available (again) to legacy machines/hardware and could help many schools and other places who have need for computers but not bleeding edge tech.

    Im sure schools get 486 and low end pentiums all the time and are forced to trash them or scrap them because nothing will run on them or cant deploy them becuase of licencing or lack of hardware limmitations. this could be what they need.

  • I just picked up an original IBM PC (5150) at the local thrift store and would love the bragging rights of having Linux working on it. Maybe others have done this, but the main hardware issues to resolve:

    1)64K RAM
    2)8 bit 8088 processor
    3)20MB HD
    Hmm, if anyone has any info on this, please reply.
  • Basing this distro on RedHat is probably the only innovation offered up here; I assume this is where the relative ease of use of the resulting distro comes from. As for minimal resource distros, you needen't go all that far... linux.org [linux.org] has an interesting list.

    True, most of the minimal resource distros there lack things such as X and decent installers.

    Besides, imho the proper way to install a minimal requirements linux on a machine is Linux from Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org], though this, to reiterate a previously made point, sort of blows the whole 'ease of use' issue out of the water.

    So my understanding would be that RULE is linux for the poor desktop.

    This, by the way, could be the main thrust of the desktop push; windows pretty much has the high-end desktop market wrapped up; why not stage an attack from the ranks of those 486's stashed away in the closet?
  • ... is currently my favourite distribution (apart from the fact it comes with rather old versions of glibc... no file... :-P )

    32Mb download - install it by unzipping onto your FAT hardrive and run the .bat file. I don't need to do any of that repartitioning stuff and it runs just fine on an old Toshiba 486-33 laptop I've got with 16Mb or Ram. (No X, of course...)
  • So what do they call old? I've got a Pentium 133 (32mb ram) running with Debian, and the newest 2.4 kernel ... it runs really smoothly as a gateway, it is even able to handle MySQL and Apache without problems ... of course it's slower that a brand new Dual P3, but that's not really important for me :)
  • However, most modern distributions seem to assume that the user has a brand-new machine...

    Too bad that I have yet to find a Linux distribution that will support all my hardware, and my machine is now 6 months old, most of the hardware has been around longer than that. For reference, everything works great and is supported under XP. Weeeeeeeeee.

  • Linux works pretty well on old hardware, but a fellow shouldn't have unreal expectations... especially with newer distrobutions. A good example of this would be Mandrake 8.1, I installed it on my ancient Dell (a PII/400 w/ 128 MB RAM)... you haven't experienced pain until you've watched kernel 2.4 boot (or GNOME/KDE, even Mozilla) run on that hardware. My roommate uses his old PC (PIII/650) for Red Hat 6.2, which is OK at best. He would be way better off with at least 384 MB RAM and probably a faster graphics card. But anything not requiring X works pretty well with his current config.

    Really, though... with hardware being pretty affordable these days, there's no reason not to use something modern.

  • Moore's Law, software bloat, and the market (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dido ( 9125 ) <dido&imperium,ph> on Saturday February 16, 2002 @06:43AM (#3017420)

    Oh, how I wish Moore's Law would finally come to an end soon, or at least come to the point that it becomes impractical for the mass market to bear the cost of supporting its continued geometric growth. The factuality of Moore's Law is one of the biggest problems with the computer market: it's truth means that the market is not stable. This allows software makers to become sloppy with their design decisions because they wind up thinking, "Oh, it's slow now, but in 18 months the top of the line systems will double in power and then have enough computing power to run this kind of bloated crap I'm putting out without being as slow as a tired snail." It's as much true of the mainstream Linux distro makers as much as it is true of Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors.

    Just for my workaday Linux distro, Red Hat 7.1. I for the life of me cannot understand why in heaven's name I need to install Kerberos to install the RPM package for CVS or LPRng. I don't have a Kerberized network and have no intention of setting such a creature up anytime in the near future, and likely it's true for most everyone. Or why I'm forced to install Japanese TTF fonts (xtt-fonts) just to get GhostScript up and running, or why printconf has to have a Kanji converter (nkf). I don't read Japanese, and I imagine the vast majority of the users of Red Hat's standard edition will never have any need to view, much less print, a Japanese-language document. The list of odd dependencies can go on and on ad nauseam, and there are many other signs of bloat. It's this kind of bloat that makes it impossible to run an up to date Linux distro on older hardware.

    The other problem comes from hardware manufacturers, which is why unless Moore's Law comes to an end someday, this trend is going to keep going. And never mind us folks whose incomes cannot support a major hardware upgrade every 18 months. When a new technology appears, they stop making the old technology almost instantly. Can you still buy EDO SIMM's? Can you still buy a non-AGP video card? Well, unless you go to a surplus shop, probably not. Because of Moore's Law and its effect on the market, obsolete hardware has a way of becoming impractical or even impossible to maintain at some point, which is why everyone, even us in the third world who don't have a lot of disposable income and can't constantly support hardware upgrades, is eventually forced to upgrade.

    While this project's aims are commendable, I wouldn't hold out too much hope for a universal adoption of its philosophy, not until Moore's Law comes to an end and the computer hardware market stabilizes as a result. Until then, I hope they remain true to the vision and not succumb to the temptations that have created the bloated monstrosities common nowadays.

    • You might give a try to Gentoo linux. Part of the install/compile is that you put some parameters in a system wide file. Things like "krb5" or "kde" or "ldap". When you build your software, the build system looks in this file and configures options based on the entries here. Running on a non-krb5 network? remove that entry. Running only kde? leave out gnome.

      It's pretty spiffy.

    • Oh, how I wish Moore's Law would finally come to an end soon...

      You'd like software innovation to slow dramatically? I don't think the end of Moore's law would have the beneficial effects you expect.

      Why do developers allow their software to become bloated? Because it's *easier* and that's a good thing. Easier means less work on tightening up features that already work, which means more time available for new stuff. I've spent a good deal of my professional life writing code for very tightly constrained environments and I can tell you that functionality does suffer when it's necessary to spend a great deal of expensive programmer time on keeping stuff small.

      Bloat is aesthetically repulsive, sure, but the alternative is *less* software and more expensive software. You may complain about having to buy a new machine every few years, but it's cheaper than the alternative.

  • Bare minimum install (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Grax ( 529699 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @06:51AM (#3017431) Homepage
    Personally I just want to see an easy to find "Bare Minimum Install" option. I know the technology is there. You can set up an auto-install script that does a bare minimum install. Why can't they make a checkbox in the install process that does that?

    When setting up a secure machine for a server it is best to start with nothing and add just enough to make it work.
  • A few months back we wanted to setup a small webserver for our research homepage and some dynamic stuff. Due to various reasons, our local system administrators were uncooperative to say the least so we decided to run our own box. Being extremely short on cash we settled for an old compaq PC donated to us by a company.

    I had a debian potato cd around, popped it in and managed to boot from it (luckily the bios supported bootable cds, I hate floppies). I installed the base install and ran into the first problem: what type of network card is in the box. Other distros would auto discover it but debian requires you to select the right kernel module. After extensive trial and error (including removing the cover to look at the very dusty interior) I figured it out. I then brought up the network (our university has plenty of bandwidth), updated the apt sources file and installed the stuff I needed openssh (so we could then unplug the workstation monitor we borrowed), various tools (less,pico,mutt, wget,ncftp,..) ,apache and the jdk1.3.1 (from SUN's site). Now I hear you think: WTF is he installing Java for on a slow machine like that!!!! But it actually works well. I also installed tomcat 3.2 for servlets and managed to run a few small servlets. In terms of load it probably can't handle very much (at this time the machine was using all its memory) but for testing purposes its fine.

    After that I had some fun tweaking the box. I installed X so that I could use a GUI (remote of course), KDE, Gnome. I updated the kernel. To be honest, debian is not for this kind of tweaking. It didn't take me long to fuck it up enough that I couldn't fix it anymore and didn't want to invest more time to find out how to fix it properly.

    The machine served our webpages for about half a year. Then we had a hardware failure (disk died) and we never replaced it. Impressively, debian managed to keep running until I foolishly (after a week) decided to reboot to find out what was going on. We never replaced it and our website now lives on the department webserver (a rediculously old sun machine so forgive me for not posting a link here :-)

    Debian is nice for small servers, it is easy to install&maintain if you know what you want and if you don't need any "testing" packages (like kernels or kde). However, it is seriously obsolete now. The woody distro is definately better in terms of features but getting it up and running is challenging (i tried a recent image using vmware last week), worst of it is that it still doesn't auto detect any hardware and comes with a 2.2 kernel by default (why is beyond me).

  • Simple (Score:2)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 )
    have a desktop option that is windowmaker and ROX. uses 1/10 the resources of gnome and KDE and is pretty much as useable with fewer bells and whistles.

    The problem lies in the fact that the only office app REQUIRES major hardware. It needs to be leaned and seperated. Abiword is a great start, but it needs some dieting also. also how about ONE decent Linux X windows email client that doesnt suck and require gnome or KDE? Chronos is cool (requires gnome) and Kmail is awesome but requires KDE.

  • I've installed Linux on several old machines, with little trouble. However, none of these would run Gnome or KDE. Here is a list:

    486 Toshiba laptop, 24M memory, 200M drive - installed Debian from floppies. X-windows with two bitplanes. I used it for Email and surfing the Web with Lynx.

    P75 Toshiba laptop, 24M memory, 500M drive, CD, installed Debian "potato" - no X windows. I'm planning to turn this machine into a wireless router.

    P120 no-name desktop, 48Meg, started with 800M drive. Red Hat 7.0. It's my home web, music etc server. No X-windows.

    I guess having a low-end X-server and window manager would be nice. Wouldn't WindowMaker work?

  • Confised to people's problems... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @10:55AM (#3017947) Homepage
    Slackware8.0 will run on anything that the kernel will run. getting linux on a 386 is childs play and takes ZERO effort if you use the correct distro.

    Hell I have linux running on a robot prototype that is a 386 computer with 16 meg ram (too much ram really) and a 4mb flash card in an ide converter. and I have a citadel touchscreen that has way less than that running linux as a nice touchscreen interface to my hot-tub mp3 player.

    Linux on super low end hardware is not hard by any means. REDHAT on super low end hardware, that's antoher story... it's hard to strip out the bloat that redhat forces on install.
    • No oits not, you just uncheck EVERYTHING in the package list. Then go rpm happy and install bare minimums as needed. I can get red Hat 7.2 on a 235 meg HD.
      • I have a 486-dx4100 notebook. It has 12 MB of ram (maybe 16 - it's been a while) and a 540MB hard drive. How do I get RH7.2 on there?

        Can't boot off CD, it doesn't have one. Can't net install because it bitches about the memory. I just want to setup some simple network things on it (snmp tools, ssh, tcpdump, etc...). Years ago I was able to put RH5.2 on it via the network, but somehow in 2 versions the network code must have ballooned up.
        • yeah, that is one problem, it needs a pile of ram to do a network install....... for some reason. Fortunately, I have an old parts dealer down the street from my place, so I can always just go spend 10 bucks and stretch a machine just a little further.

          But for what your doing, slackware or debian would probably be easier. I like to deploy redhat on stuff cause I have all its quirks pretty much figured out. Debian, I have to take with a little faith.

          As for slack.... I'm still trying to figure out why I stopped using slack, I remember it being a pure joy to work with for the most part).It has been a while, I should try slack 8 out.

          Oh wait you said network.... yeah kind iof ram is harder to find these days. Go debian..... or OpenBSD, I love OpenBSD on a laptop, although with only 540 megs of space.... the ports tree will clog the system up really fast.
          • Laptop, not network, Laptop, I am an idiot who never learned to use the preview button. Old Laptop ram is hard to find, old network ram..... I have no clue what I was thinking either....
          • I don't use Debian anymore cause I got real sick of dselect. I hear things are much better now, but oh well. I haven't used Slackware since Patrick went off the follow the Grateful Dead YEARS ago.

            Like you said, I have all the RH quirks, and all of our other systems are RH, so it makes sense to stick with one version - same for OpenBSD not really being an option.

            Time to get a slightly better junk notebook methinks.
            • yeah, I hate dselect too, and apt-get isn't do grand either in my book. My advice is still, strip it down to the bottom, and build it back up slowly, piece by pice..... its how it should be done anyways, and keep track of everything you install...... and make a customized boot disk for later installations, so you can pop it in, partition up, and run far far away.

              wait, this was that thread about not enough memory for a net install..... ummmmmm

              *runs and hides*

  • REPLY FROM THE RULE PROJECT Leader (Score:4, Informative)

    by linuxdesk ( 559424 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @11:07AM (#3017996)
    Hello, I have just finished to read all your comments with great interest as the RULE project leader, I would like to answer some questions, and clarify some points.

    1) Our project is *not* only for very old hardware. Many people (including myself) can afford much more than 16 MB of RAM, but are tired to see them all busy in drawing nice window borders. Nothing against those who like it, we just want another choice. And PLEASE look at what the LJ article says about internet appliances, PDAs and cell phones. Remember that most of what we want to do is about packaging, and smart configuration, something EVERY DISTRO CAN BENEFIT FROM (see faq #5).

    2) somebody said "don'be so cheap, you can have PCs for 300 USD". I thank all those who immediately reminded to such *lucky* guys that 300 USD or lower is average YEARLY income in most of this planet.

    3) The "use your 486 just as a thin terminal" doesn't work too well when the 486 is the most powerful PC around (or the only one...)

    4) We know that specialized distro already exist. Debian and Slackware are good too, but we think, as explained in FAQ that is time that low needs must become characteristic of every MAINSTREAM distro. Even more, that a lightweight install must be fully functional as a desktop from the first boot. Today, whatever distro you install in the minimum configuration, you have still to tweak a lot of things, because it has always been thought for server use by already expert sysadmins.

    5) To those who said "Moore law will vanify all your effort before you are finished" I can only say maybe, but if we don't start to do something, many Linux distros of 2003 will probably pretend 512 MB of RAM just to install, and 1024 to startx...

    6) We ruin economy? If more people (not only those who can buy a 2 GHz 3-d game console and use it just as a typewriter) start getting a decent education, can start a modern business, and so on, is that bad for the economy? Especially considering that after getting a job with the practice they make on RULE computers, they *will* have the money to buy something to play quake? I have nothing against that, but "buy game level HW from the very start or nothing" is wrong.

    (on the same theme, why one should be getting an IT education on old software? this would be another form of discrimination, and the reason why we don't consider tiny or similar projects a complete solution

    7) We are not going to work on non x86 HW, there is too much work to do as it is already. You are welcome to do it, especially, let me repeat it, because MUCH OF OUR WORK will be reusable on other distros/platforms.

    8) Our position w.r.t. Red Hat: they obviously know of the project, and some of their engineers are on the RULE list. We will make all RH compatible, in the sense that if your HW allows it you can start with the RULE setup, and add/upgrade with any standard RPM you want. If Red Hat will include it in its official CDs, very good, I do hope it, otherwise it will be available anyway, so what's the problem?

    I hope to see you all soon on our mailing list. We need a lot of testers, and of smart configuration suggestion, from ALL linux users.

    Ciao,
    Marco Fioretti
  • As others have pointed out, getting an OS to run on older hardware is the easy part. Try finding a usable web browser. I'm posting this with Mozilla on a PPro 200 with FreeBSD. Everything else on the box is lightning fast, but Mozilla feels like it is running on a turbo XT!
  • easy, use Slackware. They just recently stopped provision to an all floppy disk install (if you need that get 7.1). I've run it (7.1, 8 would be probably the same but I'd have to do a net install) comfortably on a 486dx2-50 with 12 megs of ram (laptop, no cdrom) and a 200 meg hard disk. No X11, but all the network tools I need plus gcc and perl and vim to hack code... Heck, the only time I every noticed how "slow" it was was when I decided to compile a newer kernel (that took, like, two days ;-)). If it doesn't have to be Linux, NetBSD or OpenBSD work pretty well in small places too...


  • As an owner of an older laptop (p75 with 16 megs of memory and a 700 meg hdd), I've noticed two major problems. One is bloat - with shared libraries, a system with a lot of apps might not take up as much space as a comparable win9x system, but with a few apps, the system takes up more space then a comparable win9x system. At the moment, I'm using 500 megs of hdd space under linux to do the same things that 300 megs of hdd space did under windows.


    My main complain is X applications. There are more then a few applications that simple *aren't* usable at 640x480 (the maximum resolution a Toshiba 400CS can do). bbconf is a pain to use, and so is xchat. (For the latter, I'm now using bitchx). Of course, if I wanted to, I could substitute a completely console based environment for an x-based one, using centericq for icq, lynx instead of dillo (which needs cookie support badly), and command line apps instead of the few X apps I use for images. Right now, under X, I'm mainly using xterms. :)


    Just my $.02

  • 2-Disk Xwindow Linux (Score:2, Informative)

    by Danyel ( 107479 )
    http://www.mungkie.btinternet.co.uk/projects/2disk Xwin.htm

    It's got a 2.4 kernel, recommends a minimum of a 486DX, has xfree 4.1 included, and it's Debian based.

    The current release is considered stable.

  • who cares (Score:3, Insightful)

    by foonf ( 447461 ) on Saturday February 16, 2002 @03:40PM (#3019022) Homepage
    First of all, there is already a "modified" RedHat out there, Peanut linux [ibiblio.org], which can be installed on more minimal systems. Second, Slackware [slackware.com] and Debian [debian.org], which use simple text based installers, can already be installed on machines with as little as 8 megabytes of RAM, and they aren't cut-down mini-distros, but real distributions which include lots of packages and can scale to almost any task. RedHat, with its resource-guzzling graphical installer and auto-configuration systems (which are absolutely useless and border on counter-productive on old machines with lots of non-PnP ISA hardware), is, with the possible exception of Mandrake, the worst possible basis I can think of for a minimalist linux distribution.

    When I saw this, what came to mind was my memory of having installed Slackware 3.2 (kernel 2.0.30 IIRC) on a 386SX with 4 megabytes of RAM about 4 years ago. And I ran X on it (sort of)! To think that their target is "32mb or less", when the system requirements of quite a bit of the base software have not changed a lot, is ridiculous. There is a need for something that can install on machines with really low memory...I don't think the trick i used to get slackware 3 on my 386 (not mounting the initial root FS on a ramdisk, creating a swap partition and adding it immediately, using two floppy drives) would work with current versions of slackware. But this isn't it, not even close.

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