Lightest of the Light Linux 396
An anonymous submitter writes: "This looks kind of interesting for those
who want to run a feather weight Linux on really old hardware."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Lightest of the Light Linux
Related Links Top of the: day, week, month.
Perfection is acheived only on the point of collapse. - C. N. Parkinson
cobalt qube (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:cobalt qube (Score:5, Funny)
sorry that was me, let the beatings begin
Re:cobalt qube (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, I do go and post links to it here don't I
Re:cobalt qube (Score:5, Informative)
I recently installed Debian on a similar but lower-memory system (8MB) as a web server (yes, I am going to add more memory soon). Aside from a memory-intensive stage where apt-get was merging some package data, it went smoothly but slowly.
The reason I mention this is that I've seen posts where people say they installed a small linux system on a computer with 4mb of memory "a while ago", and posts where someone has recently installed a small linux system on a computer with 16mb of memory or so, but no mention of really low-memory systems. So I figure that I should mention that a reasonably up-to-date distro (Debian) does install on 8mb, though it'll get ugly at one point if you don't have more like 16mb. Also, perhaps the 4mb Laptop How-To [tldp.org] is worth mentioning at this point.
My firewall (Score:3, Interesting)
The real impressive thing isn't the low hardware, it is the fact that I run TinyDNS as my external DNS server on it, use SSH for remote access (only from the internal network), handle log-file parsing and management, on the box (in the middle of the night), and many other tasks. In fact, I could do all this on a 80486, but the RAM is the big commodity with all these things. But additional performance tuning will help. Additionally it is running FreeS/WAN though we will eventually be setting up a virtual router behind the NAT for handling GRE-tunneled IPSEC between offices
In fact the thing is so highly automated I sometimes forget that it is in the corner (reports of activity are happily directed to me every morning and I don't have to access the box myself).
Had almost 90 days uptime when I had to replace the CPU fan. Now I am thinking about drop-in redundency
Re:cobalt qube (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a pretty broad generalization to make. You may not need a lot of computing power for a 10 user file server (and anyone who says you do is a total moron) but there are applications for which you do need a lot of power.
I see the mods fell for your troll though.
Re:cobalt qube (Score:4, Interesting)
Had an AMD 386DX40 box, 20MB RAM, 40MB HDD running Slackware 8. Managed to strip the install down to a hair under 20MB with a few system tools, Apache, Sendmail, and a couple userland goodies like PINE. It was running as households' gateway/firewall box to a 512k DSL hookup. Worked pretty well... max uptime was about 6 months (I was out of state for most of that time).
Eventually added another harddrive and turned it into the household MP3 server as well. Worked fine most of the time =)
Re:cobalt qube (Score:3, Interesting)
Not too hard of course, I am one of those momos during the day. On the side I do a lot of volunteer work with Linux. You have never seen the light in a peron's eyes like when you tell them the only thing they need for their server is a bigger hard drive.
2 Laptops from Ebay: $120
New Hard drive and case, and a pair of PCMCIA network cards: $200
Old motherboard, CPU and RAM: Free
Being able to tell your wife that you DO actually use those old parts you keep in the basement: Priceless
Re:cobalt qube (Score:3, Interesting)
And then he specced 10mbit net cards (Can you still get these days?).
I really just didn't get it.
We put in 100s instead , and it's suffice to say that prior commissioning, it made a *mean* Quake 3 server!
Re:cobalt qube (Score:3, Informative)
whoever said you need alot of computing power for a server is wrong
Not entirely true, but that's close to what I believe.
I had an old P5-233/64M/SCSI system for an office fileserver. Upgraded the SCSI system to UW2 hardware RAID5 and had all manner of problem. Turned out that the TX chipset couldn't handle the newer PCI bus master. There's now a P2-233 in there but the bandwidth utilization graphs seem to indicate that the CPU is still the bottleneck (the LAN isn't saturated, and the sustained disk I/O could bury the LAN several times over). I think samba is having trouble keeping numerous smaller feeds open than one or two big pipes. Oh well. :-)
Re:cobalt qube (Score:3, Interesting)
As of this weekend, my 8MB, 33MHz, 2Gig disk, 486 runs debian testing. Good for an NFS link, RAM usage hits 5MB into swap, so all the ssh connections (all 2 of them) sit in swap, and have to be swapped in. But nfs-kernel-server takes bugger all, and doesn't get swapped, because it is kernel, so is quite fast.
Did I mention that the hard disk has plenty of bad sectors? Haven't lost any data yet
Re:cobalt qube (Score:3, Interesting)
I forgot to mention, the way I do an apt-get install/upgrade/remove, etc is to run apt-get on my 650MHz laptop, in a chroot environment over nfs, with
Much much faster, concidering dpkg likes to chew through 16Megs of RAM
I once did a kernel compile on this machine, years ago, when it was deadrat 4, and nevel will, again.
I would like to .... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I would like to .... (Score:3, Interesting)
anyway, if you have a fast machine, you probably would be better off using the algorithm which, say, has more instructions to keep you doing calculations in the most time efficient way than bottlenecking yourself to give you a few kb more available ram.
Then again one of Gordon Bell's laws says that "the simplest way to program something is probably the fastest" so go boot up a featherweight linux on your box, benchmark it and post the results to slashdot! You'd probably make the front page.
Re:I would like to .... (Score:3, Interesting)
the inverse is a good idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, just pull up a console, kill all your services and boggie. It does make a difference. Your nasty math problems will be able to suck up all your memory and little will interrupt. You can go down from there if you wish. Boot up with grub to ye new Spartan kernel, and define a run level that's just like you want it and kick some ass. Spend a few more bucks to set up as many machines as you have projects. SSH into it to start your problem and then get your answer.
Pitty all OS are not so easy to configure. You want more, you got it. You want less, OK. You want to throw everything you got at one thing, go for it. A box that you have to leave your chair to mess with is a pain, and should be fixed with a new OS.
PDA anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:PDA anyone? (Score:2)
Re:PDA anyone? (Score:2)
On a better system, such as an IPAQ, the story can be completely different...
Re:PDA anyone? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:PDA anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
I've seen and worked with companies that built several systems based on it, and it's not a bad way to get Linux-sized flexibility and power in a small, inexpensive package. It was/is straightforward, once one understands system behavior without copy-on-write forking semantics.
A few years ago, a good example of a uClinux implementation was the uCsimm, a 30-pin SIMM sized machine based on the Motorola 68EZ328. 8Mbytes RAM, 2 Mbytes flash, Crystal 8900 (10 Mbit) Ethernet. The 68EZ328 powers all pre-PalmOS-5.0 units. We had a web server with complete CGI capability, as well as several additional communication front-end tools. So I know Linux runs on the 68EZ328, and I've seen references to the Palm H/W in the uClinux kernel code, though I haven't tried it on my Palm...
More recently, uClinux also runs on NetSilicon Net+ARM family processors, http://www.netsilicon.com/
The people who tried to commercialize uClinux (and probably worked on uClibc, though I am less sure of this connection) were Rt-Control, a Canadian company that were subsequently acquired by Lineo: http://www.lineo.com/
I have no relationship with either Lineo or NetSilicon, other than being a (mostly) satisfied customer.
Re:PDA anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)
From the other end of the discussion... (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't run a GUI for a start. (Score:2)
Real sys admins use a command line anyway (JOKE).
Re:Don't run a GUI for a start. (Score:4, Informative)
This is exactly how I run my servers.
Re:Don't run a GUI for a start. (Score:3, Informative)
He should leave it installed unless disk space or security are the issue. Even if he can't afford the ram/cycles to run an X server, he can display apps remotely when he needs to. But really, he should install some more RAM and give the poor disk drive a break.
Re:Don't run a GUI for a start. (Score:5, Insightful)
IMHO It's not such a bad joke to run a machine command-line-only for a while, or permanently. The greatest service you can do to your general knowledge of all things computing, is use a broad range of machines/interfaces outside your common experience. When I started with linux, I just accepted it was mostly commandline stuff (that was a year ago) - and for my uses, it mostly still is. I've run PCs, Macs, Linux from only a command line, Linux with a GUI, Amigas, Dos, Windows, Netware - a bit of everything.
Jump into the command line-only thing for a while. run something lightweight on a 486 and enjoy the learning experience
Re:From the other end of the discussion... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:From the other end of the discussion... (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe I'm lucky, or have low expectations, but I run Debian with GNOME on a Pentium 150. Works fine for me. I can surf the Web, read email or do word processing while listening to MP3s on XMMS. Granted, XMMS didn't work very well until I recompiled my kernel.
Re:From the other end of the discussion... (Score:4, Funny)
"apt-get remove -purge *", right?
Re:From the other end of the discussion... (Score:2, Informative)
My main network/internet server is a measly ol' IBM Pentium Pro 200MHz. I could upgrade it (I've got several much faster systems gathering dust) - but why?
It handles my light website traffic (a few thousand visits/day) with Apache/PHP/MySQL, and runs Squid, ProFTPd, Qmail, JabberD, and Samba for fileserving to the network... plus whatever I want to do at a console. And it barely breaks a sweat.
Re:From the other end of the discussion... (Score:2)
I just ran into this on a P60 with 40mB RAM. Try turning off the remote checks. Also, if you're running Exim, there's a setting to control how many simultaneous messages it tries to deliver. Each time it attempts a delivery, it forks a Spamassassin. Try searching Google groups for "slow debian spamassassin" and see what you get.
Re:From the other end of the discussion... (Score:2)
dave "sounds vaguely rude"
Um... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Um... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Um... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Um... (Score:2)
microsoft.com has address 207.46.230.220
microsoft.com has address 207.46.249.27
microsoft.com has address 207.46.134.155
microsoft.com has address 207.46.134.190
microsoft.com has address 207.46.134.222
microsoft.com has address 207.46.230.218
so does...
timewarner.com has address 64.12.146.40
timewarner.com has address 205.188.238.65
timewarner.com has address 205.188.238.66
timewarner.com has address 205.188.238.67
timewarner.com has address 205.188.238.68
Re:Um... (Score:4, Funny)
That's because Microsoft is running IIS on windows so they have all the overhead of a GUI, SMB, WINS, AD, etc. and need to have more machines to get the same effect
Been doing this for years (Score:4, Funny)
Older OS's?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)
MS-DOS etc all had X-servers that used little memory + other useful tools.
You'll find little advantage in squeezing linux on really old machines.
Re:Older OS's?!?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm currently going for a FreeBSD install on an older machine because it has an easy network-bootstrap install.
I did shoehorn Win98 onto a 486/66 for my burglar alarm, but it's not a pretty sight.
Re:Older OS's?!?! (Score:2, Interesting)
I actually dual boot the P133 into Debian as well. IceWM & Dillo actually are make it quite a snappy setup.
Re:Older OS's?!?! (Score:3, Funny)
must resist urge to post snide comment ...
Re:Older OS's?!?! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Older OS's?!?! (Score:3, Funny)
But my cunning plan was to have a talking clippy-type character pop up on the screen and annoy any burglars away. ("You seem to be trying to break into the apartment...") I'll just have to make do with a wonderfully robotic text-to-speech card. I might still keep Windows on that machine, FreeBSD on others.
The networking part is so that when he switches that machine off, he gets a surprise. ("No Jacque, not this dam...")
Re:Older OS's?!?! (Score:4, Funny)
where do you live again?
Re:Older OS's?!?! (Score:2)
Mini-distros (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Mini-distros (Score:4, Interesting)
Feather weight OS's (Score:2, Insightful)
-- AcquaCow
Re:Feather weight OS's (Score:3, Interesting)
They are currently working on win2K-XP version, but work is understanably slow.
Seriously, check it out!
Re:Feather weight OS's (Score:2, Insightful)
-- AcquaCow
Comparison (Score:5, Interesting)
-Benjamin Meyer
Re:Comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
The concept of uclibc and dietlibc is to support the 10% of APIs that 90% of programs use, and to behave better with static linking. uclibc makes some sacrifices to work better with glibc-based software (I don't have exact numbers since I don't use uclibc). dietlibc goes completely to the extreme; anything that can be cut is cut, and object code is carefully divided so that static executables only include the code they really need.
For concrete examples, see the static binaries compiled by dietlibc's author at ftp://foobar.math.fu-berlin.de:2121/pub/dietlibc/
(cat is 3KB, tar is 63KB, the thttpd web server is 42KB - add them up and you are just about equal to hello-world.c with glibc). Compare these with the sizes of even dynamically-linked glibc binaries on your own system.
The reason you wouldn't want to use a cut-down libc for something like Gnome or KDE is that you'd have to recompile your entire system, including the X libraries and all other dependencies. (you can't use your existing X libraries since they are already linked to glibc). Along the way you are sure to run into one or two obscure C library APIs that only glibc implements.
I think eventually there is a chance that glibc will be replaced by one of the cut-down libcs. The degree of bloat in glibc is simply obscene, and on top of that there is the backwards-incompatibility problem. (many packages broke during the transitions from 2.1 to 2.2 to 2.3, which should never have happened with a stable thing like the C library). Linus himself has even floated this suggestion on the LKML. The question that remains is whether the full glibc API can be implemented without creating another bloated monster. (there is no real alternative, since glibc's API has been enshrined in the LSB already...)
On a similar note, I'd love to see GCC drop the problematic GNU STL for STLport. In my tests STLport has about half the cost in compile time and code size...
Re:Comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
But you've got to be kidding. It is a simply absurd statement. I don't think you understand the situtation, because to understand the situation you would have to know what the real design goals of glibc are and how they affected the library.
static hello-world.c is >100KB)
Okay, and how big is dynamically linked hello-world.c? There aren't that many reasons to statically link a program. There may be some on reducing program size, but I would think Emacs and OpenOffice and Mozilla - the many megabyte executables - would be much more interesting than 100KB.
most of which is never used by most programs (e.g. locales).
How do you measure that? Every program that's not a server needs to be using locales; returning localized messages and sorting information the way the user would expect it are two big things.
The degree of bloat in glibc is simply obscene, and on top of that there is the backwards-incompatibility problem.
What exactly is an obscene amount of bloat? I have QT, GTK, 3 KDE libs and 2 Mozilla libs loaded into memory, each of which is larger than glibc. Why should I worry about the 8th largest library open on my system?
The uclibc people understand that they were trading speed and standards-complance for size, and know that it's not a good tradeoff for everyone. Do you really understand what tradeoffs were made in glibc, well enough to make a better library?
The reason why there's the backward compatibility problem is two-fold; first, people keep trying to link directly to glibc's internals, and not changing those would be a pain, and second, you want to make major improvements, but changing the libc major number is a flag day, so they try to support old stuff while making major changes, with some success and some failure.
The question that remains is whether the full glibc API can be implemented without creating another bloated monster. (there is no real alternative, since glibc's API has been enshrined in the LSB already...)
There is no real alternative, because most of glibc's API comes from POSIX and Single Unix Standard (SUS), or from traditional BSD functions.
Re:Comparison (Score:4, Interesting)
Glibc is optimized for speed and standards compliance. It's also what Gnome and KDE and everything else on Linux is tested with, and has vastly more testers. I had 128 MB of RAM on this box when I bought it four years ago, and it wasn't top of the line. What's a half of MB of memory, especially as it cost me less than $50 to upgrade it to 384 MB?
I just ran memstat on my box. I'm running a konsole, and mozilla and emacs. Glibc is pretty far down on the list of memory wasters. Mozilla takes up 22 MB; xfs 15 MB; QT 5 MB; Emacs 3 MB; bbkeys 5 MB (I smell a memory leak); libkio 2 MB; 1.2 MB for each of libgtk and libkdecore. Deep down in this list is glibc, taking up just over 1 MB. If you're going to be running Gnome and/or KDE, glibc is not your memory waster.
IBM provides a stable home for "little linux" (Score:5, Informative)
Great! but as tiny linuxes go, ramf [tux.org] has support for Reiserfs, and a lot of people I know rely on tomsrtbt [toms.net]. Almost all of the information in the IBM page submitted here is already available, but it's really nice to see IBM providing a stable home for this type of information -- while the original linux from scratch server [linuxfromscratch.org] flounders (was it those big bandwidth bills from being /.ed did it in?) and the first cool rescue thing I used, cclinux, has all but disappeared. sigh!
So thanks, IBM. This time.
OT: LFS (Score:3, Interesting)
But, alas, what killed it for me was the complexity of the modern desktop. KDE was easy to compile and install, but a thousand neat little features of KDE (like the audio cd to mp3 interface) never worked right. Any time I saw something cool, I needed to go back and recompile some new flag into some library...and then recompile everything thay used that lib. It was a major PITA.
LFS should be everyone's first distro. The ammount of knowledge you gain from struggling with something as simple as getting 'ls' to output in colors will help tremendously in the rest of your linux journey. That being said, the LFS community probably isn't up to the task of supporting hundreds (thousands) of newbies. Especially if they bombard the IRC channels with even a tenth of the questions I laid on those guys.
LFS is awesome for a learning tool, and I want to thank the LFS community for their project/product.
386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port (Score:5, Interesting)
The floppy was enough to boot it, 4 Megs RAM is perfect for a small kernel, some shells and telnets, everything else (even the swap) comes through PLIP on the printer port.
It was much funnier than my VT420 terminal
Re:386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port (Score:3, Interesting)
I might haul that CD out for my 486-66 32M ram, which is being used as a burglar alarm. (Hey, I need some platform to plug my old ISA cards into.) With all the bugs in the software, I'd never put that machine on the Internet, but on the LAN, who cares?
uClinux + busybox (Score:5, Informative)
How much space saving? Well, at my work, we initially prototyped some programs that ended up at around 1 MByte, statically linked to glibc. The same program was 120K after statically linking to uclibc, and then 35K after dynamic linking to uclibc.
I know there's various individual efforts out there to re-build Debian around uclibc. Imagine being able to put a full-featured Debian package on a business-card-sized mini-CD's that you can always keep in your wallet!
Re:uClinux + busybox (Score:5, Funny)
Re:uClinux + busybox (Score:4, Funny)
Shouldn't you be popping something else into her box instead? Something a little bit more, ah, interactive?
Yeesh.
</joke>
(tags inserted for the humour impaired)
FreeBSD (Score:4, Informative)
3.4. What do I need in order to run FreeBSD?
You will need a 386 or better PC, with 5 MB or more of RAM and at least 60 MB of hard disk space. It can run with a low end MDA graphics card but to run X11R6, a VGA or better video card is needed.
low resources (Score:3, Insightful)
My first linux install was a 486DX2, witn a 66Mhz chip, 4Mb of ram, and I was installing onto an 80Gb hard drive.
Before this sounds like a "When I was a Boy" story, I could install X and gcc, but not at the same time. When I say I could install X, it would run
Just because something is possible, doesn't mean you want to do it.
Re:low resources (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:low resources (Score:3, Informative)
0,$s/GB/MB/g
Mind you, it handled the 4GB disk quite well, once linux booted. Of course, it had a bit more ram then.
Re:low resources (Score:3, Informative)
As long as the bios can see enough information to boot linux, the linux kernal can access any disk, independent of the bios. I have an 80 GByte disk in my pentium 133, and the bios refuses to see it, but has no problem booting since the boot partition is on a smaller 1 Gbyte disk, which then mounts the 80 gigger as /home
Use Busybox in all distributions (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Use Busybox in all distributions (Score:3, Informative)
With busybox, you just end up leaving dozens of symlinks littered all over the root filesystem. (bb looks at what the symlink it is called from is named and executes the proper command). From a file-system path search perspective, it is exactly the same thing as a bunch of little binaries. Plus, you get the advantage of easier maintenance, more functionality, better performance, easier drop-in replacement, and less chance of a developer turf-war (the maintainers of 'find' don't ever need to talk to the maintainers of 'grep', etc.).
Re:Use Busybox in all distributions (Score:5, Informative)
Busybox works two ways, either
If you do it the first way, busybox "command" you'd have to type the extra letters all the time. You can alias it, but then you'd have to have a support issue with all the users unless you had universal aliases, and thats not optimal.
If you do it the second way, with the symlinks or hardlinks, you still have all the things in
The code in busybox gets complicated. The added elegance in the file system becomes complications in the source code. Any updates to any of the "functions" as busybox calls them, requires an update to essentially all your userland utilities (as expressed in busybox). Lots of updates, lots of testing, because now any change to anytihng in busybox requires you to test everything, because a change in the ls "function" is in the same code that contains your mount command, and your cat, and your rm, etc., and now you need to test all of those as well.
Shared code can go into libraries. That's why libc is usually dynamically linked, shared code should be shared. You get your elegance with asmall executable with much of it's guts in shared libraries. Elegance here causes ugliness there. You pick your battles, you do things the way you want to. That said, busybox is opensource, and all of the gnu utilities are opensource as well. I don't think the busybox folks would mind patches from you or any others that share the view. I personally don't agree, my "elegance" is in smaller utilities with well defined functions, and I would not contribute.
What about Linux from Scracth? (Score:3, Informative)
Also includes a CowboyNeal load of documentation!
excellent article.. (Score:2)
This article is great at introducing the rest of us to something that the embedded linux crowd has used for years... roll-your-own mini-distro. Linux doing something that Windows can-not do.
Slackware supports only 4 megs of ram (Score:2, Informative)
Just look inside the bootdisk directory for the disk called lowmem...
- ac
Try Slackware (Score:5, Informative)
* 386 processor
* 16MB RAM
* 50 megabytes of hard disk space
* 3.5" floppy drive
By the way, that's not the requirements for an old version... That's for version 8.1 with the 2.4.18 kernel... Have fun.
Re:Try Slackware (Score:5, Funny)
* 386 processor - check! (1.4ghz)
* 16MB RAM - check (512mb)
* 50 megabytes of hard disk space - check (40gb)
* 3.5" floppy drive - doh!
oh well, cant win 'em all.
small size does come with a price (Score:3, Interesting)
I spent several months with a small group of people putting together an embedded system, which used both uClibc and Busybox. While these are undoubtedly excellent pieces of open source software which are great for embedded systems, I find their use questionable for everyday desktop computing.
For example, many features you take for granted, say, with bash (such as compound commands, the full featured command execution environment) are not available with the smaller, simpler shells in Busybox.
The small size does come at a price... after all, the reason they are smaller is because along with the bloat, some of the less frequently used functionality has been removed.
what's wrong with Debian? (Score:3, Interesting)
Huh? Those are really light requirements and with some additional RAM, that laptop could run X without a problem. Debinate it!
My 760LD has only 24M of RAM. It felt a little crammped with the 800 MB hard drive that came with it, but the only thing tedious about the installation of 2.2 potato was making the base install floppies. Once that was on, I could put the CD ROM in and zippy, no problem. The same har drive then worked with a much older Toshiba 468 with 8 or 16 MB or RAM. Yes, it does ssh. I got a bigger hard drive to feel less cramped and get more window managers. Using OLVWM I was able to make it display more than 256 colors, but it was stable with all the window managers I tried was stable with 256 colors. I probably boned up the ammount of RAM the card actually has, or missed some kind of shared memory thingy, shrug, it works.
For the lighter requirements this guy has, he should have loads of extra space and it should work just snappy. My 486 gateway runs a little ftp, ssh and most of the standard distro. It takes less than 150 MB of system files to do that, leaving 350 MB for temproary files.
Indeed, this fellows low expectations for his hardware should make the insalation much easier. I recenlty built a debian box on a 33MHz 486 with 8 or 12 MB RAM. It was painful, but you can just drop your hard disk into a nicer box and just put on the few things you want from a vanilla i386 binary install disk. If all you put on is i386, just put it all on in something with a little more RAM and pep, then drop it into your target. The kernel should adapt to it's new environment.
Apt-get upgrade was a little painful last time, with the new OpenSSH stuff but it did, finally, work. I had to manually dpkg the new packages and read the error messages and it took a day, grrrr! I should have left it alone, but I'm glad it's done.
Oh well, the man's effort is not wasted. His site is great for those who wish to really cut out the fluff and have a beautiful Spartan install. For the rest of you, I recomend the much easier Debian apt-get path.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! (Score:3, Funny)
Same computing power.
Re:Imagine a beowulf cluster of these! (Score:3, Funny)
Person 'A' asked person 'B' about the 'i386' notation on all the RPMs.
'B' said that it meant it was compiled on a 386.
'A' asked how someone could compile all those files on an old 386.
'B'managed to convince A that they have a cluster of hundreds of old 386's where they compile all the source code into RPMs.
I nearly fell over, laughing.
Two quick points: (Score:5, Interesting)
2) The versatility of Linux is really inspiring. We have everything from floppy distros, and game machines to Gnome, KDE and Lycoris all using variations of the same kernel. I, for one, think that's pretty cool.
Looking forward to the next installment (Score:3, Interesting)
I started with tomsrtbt on floppies, then installed it onto the hard drive. Once I had a working system I compiled a kernel with the sound card and network drivers and copied that over. Everything works great. There's something surreal about using a kernel that was just updated last week with hardware that hasn't been sold in almost 10 years.
I'm having trouble statically linking sshd, so I'm looking forward to the next installment. Shouldn't be too hard to set up dynamic libraries, but advice from someone who has done it already always helps.
The writer went way too far. The EASY WAY IS: (Score:5, Informative)
Step 1. I have an external floppy that connects to the PCMCIA slot, and a parallel port zipdrive. So, I downloaded Zipslack (available on the Slackware website) and the companion, fourmeg.zip, which creates a swap file. Zipslack is interesting because it creates a UMSDOS slackware installation on a zipdisk (just unzip it to the zipdisk). This can then be booted from the zipslack boot floppy (boot from the boot floppy, then direct root at
2. Once in Zipslack, I had to set up the Itronix's hard disks for Linux. So, first, I fdisked, and set up most of each disk as a type 83 Linux partition, and the rest as a type 82 Linux swap. I probably gave too much swap; I took a guess for the "big" ones and made it like 88 cylinders; I think it turned out to be better than 128MB (I made it a LOT smaller on my little ones). Next, I formatted the disk: I ran the command:
"mke2fs -L armadillo -c -c -j
This surprised me a little, pleasantly: I knew the two "-c" params would cause it to overwrite the disk with nulls, but it did it FOUR TIMES, which is pretty damn thorough. Once that finished up (it took at least an hour on my old machines) I mounted the disk as type "ext3" on
3. Now, I copied my entire root directory onto the mount point, leaving out the loadlin stuff and files that were obviously DOS related (like the DOS mount directory). I copied each directory using (for example) "cp -a
4. This time, I pointed the root directory at
The result is that my little Linux machines all work perfectly!
On my "big" ones, I put a bunch more stuff in. I put in the development disk set, plus x, xap, most of n, and this coming week I'm adding kde and gnome. On my "little" ones, I've only got 260MB of space, so I'm going to stick with text-mode. I'm toying with the idea of using emacs as an environment for those, IF the e set will fit on 'em of course.
The most expensive of these laptops was 150.00. The cheapest was 25.00. Zipslack was free. Now, is that a great deal or what? Especially considering they're like indestructible little armadillo monsters, right?
Oh, by the way: I'm using Zipslack 8.1 and I'll probably upgrade to 9.0 when it comes out. Gotta love Slackware! Bob RULES!
BTW: my grammar isn't so hot today. It's the Marine Corps Birthday (10 Nov) and the "Marine Corps Drink" is the Rum and Coke, so cut me some slack there (ha! get it? SLACK! I slay me)...
FreeBSD may be an option (Score:5, Interesting)
Gentoo may be another option due to its liteness upon default install. Everything and I mean everything must be configured and installed via "emerge x". This is also the downside. IF you have a slow 386 and a 28. modem for an internet connection you can expect s several day installation.
NetBSD seems popular with many users with old machines like ancient macs. It may be more minimalist but I have never used it. Perhaps someone who has could care to comment. I like FreeBSD because of the excellent book that comes with the box set which will be helpfull since you will not have any of the gui point and click utilities like anaconda and yast2 to setup your 386.
I like Linux myself because I am use to the SYSV init. I do not wish to start a flameware but FreeBSD is great for minimal installs and come with the best console documentation. It has its uses and if your use standard free software like sambe or apache, then a *BSD variant or Linux one wont matter.
Re:FreeBSD may be an option (Score:3, Informative)
"Minimal" system my arse! (Score:3, Interesting)
My first linux machine was a 386 with 4M ram. I had to upgrade to 8M fairly quickly because it would totally thrash when I tried to compile the kernel (or almost anything else bigger than hello.c) and I couldn't run X at all until I got a 486..
Kids these days.. bah!!
I'll bookmark the link though; I have a spare P100 with 8M on it that I'd like to turn into a dedicated mp3/ogg player.
uClibc is not going to replace glibc (Score:5, Insightful)
Small single-task operating systems. (Score:3, Interesting)
One of these was a version of OS/2, complete with gui, 4os2 and cdburner, that lived in 10 megabytes.
The installation was not hard - sysintx and rar did it.
So I could use the main version of OS/2 without having to worry about chewing up memory for the cd-burner. OS/2 breaks the 504 barrier for HPFS partitions. So does Linux, and Windows NT, the former installed but never booted.
OS/2 has a considerably smaller footprint, given that a lot of it can be installed on another drive.
The idea of having a small footprint is not bad at all. You can make a boot cd that runs the desired OS off the cdrom and ramdisk. This is how eComStation installs.
In fact, the notion of one OS for all tasks is quite unecconomical, especially if the machine is to run unattended, or in a specific activity.
You can burn cdroms off in 20 mb of ram. There are utilities that unload dlls to expediate the process.. (eg allocmem)
.
Great article is just the start (Score:3, Funny)
Future installments in the "breaking the cycle" series include:
Maintaining your 1932 Pierce Arrow [velocityjrnl.com]
Connecting cable to your Philco Predicta [nappepin.com]
Making ice [cedarfallshistorical.org] last through the summer
Rolling your own condoms [plannedparenthood.org]
What would be really cool (Score:3, Informative)
which is already set up to run on old hardware, has some really great configuration tools, but really outdated software (2.0.x kernel, libc5, X 3.3.1), such that I shuddered when connecting it to the internet.
Not Impressed (Score:4, Interesting)
---
Goto, n.:
A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers
to complain about unstructured programmers.
-- Ray Simard
Lthe lightest linux ever (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, it wouldn't do much, but it's linux, it boots from a 386 without hard disk, and most of all it doesn't require a keyboard. Obviously, if you want a decent performance you need a P4 2.8 GHz.
Humbug (Score:5, Interesting)
Specs:
386sx @ 16Mhz
5 Megs RAM (subtract a bit for BIOS shadowing...)
240MB HDD (half DOS, half Linux ext2)
No PCMCIA, Ethernet, or IR ports.
Currently boots MS-DOS/Win3.1 and then uses LoadLinux.
Installed: Perl, GCC tool chain, vi, and just barely enough of everything else to get by.
I tried FreeBSD first -- that's what I normally run on my Unix boxes. However, while it can run on 5MB, it is a real challenge to get it installed with only 5MB -- the installer needs 8MB, and with no swap partition set up, it can only use RAM.
I came to the conclusion that the main problem with running a nice OS on not-so-nice hardware is getting a swap partition set up. Once Linux and FreeBSD have a little virtual memory to use, they can get by on just 4MB. But until the swap partition is mounted, everything has to squeeze into that 4MB, and it simply doesn't work.
I tried a few other distros before I finally found something that worked. It was called "ZipHam Linux." It was a derivative of Slackware running 2.0.38, and specialized for HAM radio enthusiasts. Once I had a swap partition set up, I could actually do stuff. I transferred packages via MS-DOS's InterLnk (parallel cable) and upgraded to the latest kernel I thought would work.
Recompiling the kernel on a 386sx with 4MB of RAM is an exercise in patience. I think it took about 23 hours. But it compiled! Yay. And booted.
About a year later, I graduated from college, got a better job, and bought a more reasonable laptop. As a result, the old one doesn't see much use anymore. But I still think it is pretty cool. And since it is actually the only Linux box in the house (1 FreeBSD box, and I run Linux under Bochs occasionally, but no other hardware dedicated to Linux), I sometimes fire it up just for kicks.
Not Linux, but.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:BSD's to the rescue (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyone remember Windows for Workgroups 3.11? It could run in "enhanced" mode which was 32-bit pmode, or "standard" mode--you guessed it, 16-bit pmode. Since I assume 32- and 16-bit protected mode are similar in intent but varying in widths, does this mean FreeBSD can be slightly modified to run on a 16-bit 80286? What about Linux? (No, I don't want to run Minix.)
Re:BSD's to the rescue (Score:2, Informative)
Re:BSD's to the rescue (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BSD's to the rescue (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, Mark Williams used to have Coherent 286. Proprietary, but not bad for its day. The company is long gone, but someone might have a copy. I used Coherent 386 for a few years until MWC died and Linux stablized.