Slashdot Mirror
Linux on Older Hardware
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."
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.
From the article:
In the user space, for example, we also want to print color with the latest Postscript drivers.
Because we all have a cheap color printer laying around, right?
Dammit, if the idea is to support old / cheap machines, what is this sort of fluff?
Writers imply. Readers infer.
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.
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.
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.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
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?
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:
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.
Damn you Slashdot. Who would have thought that you could have too many choices for using a 486?
They that would sacrifice their
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
Free Open Source Naked Ladies!
The most bloated linux distro will still be faster and more stable on older hardware than any current MS OS.
Microsoft Windows NT can be run on a 386 20MHz machine. Do you have the urge yet?
Microflop Windows XP can be run on a Pentium 200MHz machine with only(Microsoft TM) 64MB RAM. Do you have the urge yet?
KDE 3.0 and GNOME 2.0 can run on anything 386 in general. Do you have the urge yet?
At least Linux updates its older hardware support. Microsoft just burries support in each release of their OS.
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.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
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, 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, 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).
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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.
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).
32 megs required.
That must be one hell of a fancy installer. With an 8 megs requirement Debian has supercow and music, and a game of doom during an install. I can't imagine what sort of out of this world fantastic experience they have created with 32!.
*All warranties null and void when your eyes reach this line, by moving your eyes to this line, you give $FOO explicit control of your life from this point on and then of your estate once you have passed away.
++When your eyes reach this line, your warranty, extended warranty, and Bumpoer to Bumper(Tm) warrenty become null and void, and you are no longer allowed on the dealer premises unless you come to buy a new $FOO $MACHINE..
...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?
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
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
It is true!
Now that I realize that is is in fact a nick ban instead of a IP ban I will resend my war announcement and just realize that Jamie is a turd burgular and thought that this was in fact the real klerck.
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
Nice choice if being an oddball is an intrinsic part of your psyche.
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...)
- 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...)
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.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
from:
http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/rule/todolist.h
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...
I use mandrake on my old pentium III 450Mhz machine with 64MB of ram! It runs faster then windows ever did, it can be slow when you run too many programs, but thats the case with all systems!
It also runs mozilla super fast! I recomend mandrake linux to windows 98 users and older machines can use something lighter such as slackware.
Isn't this another reason why source-based distros like Gentoo or Sorcerer 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?
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.
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 (summary: it hurts, but it's possible). And for Mandrake, check out this Slashdot article about Mandrake's upcoming super-super-minimal install.
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.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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.
You should spend less time on-line. If this person's ignorance has passed you by, you may become suckered in by onlne scam artists. For your own protection, please turn off your computer and sit in your closet.
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 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, 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?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Linux was origanally designed for the 386, It can do it, but all computers are happier with a faster enviroment! Some body should get linux on something REALLY OLD, Like a 286 or a 8086!
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!
... is currently my favourite distribution (apart from the fact it comes with rather old versions of glibc... no file... :-P )
.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...)
32Mb download - install it by unzipping onto your FAT hardrive and run the
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 :)
Life sucks.
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.
What?
debian gnu/linux is modern! they support like every shit ..
apt-get.mine.nu
Windoze not found: (C)heer, (P)arty or (D)ance
- 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.
While this is true in most western countries, it is absolutely wrong in many regions of the world.The CS school I've been in has many students organizations. One of them, EFREI Aide Humanitaire (french link, use the fish) helps schools in Africa to get CS related stuff, by collecting "old" mobos, towers, harddisks, and so on.
What's old for us is quite new for them. Hey, the whole "desktop computer" thingy is quite new (it's only 25 years old) ! One may argue that old hardware may run old software well, so why don't they use linux 1.x ? I would answer I don't see the reason why they should use buggy software when bugs have been corrected for years. Linux is a modern OS these people can use.
I agree that making backward compatible software should not be a goal. Microsoft shows us what it can lead to. I would instead say it should be a motivation. Do not cut compatibility where it's not necessary, and if you do, try to provide a way for other developers to easily make it compatible.
Julien
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.
The word "fag" is a contraction of the word "faggot" (or, "fagot"). When traced through its etymological history, the word "faggot" simply means "a bundle of sticks used as fuel." See dictionary.com and thesaurus.com (where such words as "fuel" and "brimstone" are used as synonyms). "Scholars" can't decide when such a word began to be used in reference to homosexuals , so we'll give the answer here: "I have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord." Amos 4:11. The word translated "firebrand" is the Hebrew word "uwd," which comes from a Hebrew verb meaning "to rake together" (or, "to gather together"). In short, the Hebrew word "uwd" is talking about burning sticks of wood that are gathered together. That is what the English word "faggot" means. Amos 4:11 could just as easily be translated "...ye were as a faggot plucked out of the burning..."
For those geniuses out there who are asking, "are you saying that God hates burning pieces of wood?", the answer is "no, we're using it as a figure of speech, just like the Bible uses it." It is an excellent metaphor to describe sodomites because they fuel God's wrath, they burn in lust, and they will burn in hell . In Amos 4:11, the "fag" is the person who is sinning after the manner of Sodom and Gomorrah, has seen other "fags" overthrown by God, and still refuses to repent. So, the word "fag" refers to people who sin like the Sodomites did. It not only refers to homosexuals, but also refers to people who support homosexuals (see Romans 1:32), and people who engage in all other relatively "lesser" perversions (like impenitent premarital sex and adultery, including the adultery of all of you divorced-and-remarried "born again Christians"). On this web site, we use the word "fag" in accordance with Amos 4:11.
For those of you who have deluded yourselves into thinking that the story of Sodom isn't really talking about homosexuals , read the following: the people of Sodom and Gomorrah had completely turned away from God, and whenever that happens, homosexuality abounds. Paul described this in Romans 1, and you can read the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19. Conditions in Sodom were so bad that it had become acceptable for men to surround Lot's house and ask to have sex with the men inside. Anybody who thinks that today is any different than those days needs to attend San Francisco's annual gay rights parade, stand along the parade route, and hold a sign that says "GOD HATES FAGS." You'll see and hear evidence of all of the sins of Sodom in just a few short hours (sodomy, violence, fornication, adultery, pride, sinful treatment of the servants of God, etc.) The same mob mentality that ruled the unlawful fags in the days of Sodom rules the unlawful fags t
As in windows
I hope you read that EULA, you are bills slave now HAHAHAHA!
Uhh . . . at the risk of dignifying this with an answer . . . how do you figure?
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.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
A defenseless girl likely to be raped by a linux geek = a paraplegic retarded girl.
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.
Coding Blog
fits inside my old 386 with 8mb of ram, and performs a usefull task ( dialup masqing gateway ), and it does so with a smile and a cherry on top of its 7.5 bogomips :)
I have several older machines I keep lying around, and I always find a way to put them to work to do something... (even something as simple as calculating pi). So why not make a non-bloated installation for my older machines sounds like a good idea... After all no one seems to be offering "minimal" installations straight out of the box anymore :-P
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
Will you kiss me afterwards?
STRANGELY, MOST WON'T REMEMBER WHERE
... Am I right?"
... January 22nd ...? 1998? ... the day Netscape decided to release the source code for its browser? Where the hell have you been?"
... Dec. 28? oh please ... think .... Dec. 28, 1969 ... Linus Torvald's birthday, for God's sake! ... Jesus, is everybody sleepwalking through life?"
THEY WERE DAY LINUX 2.4 RELEASED
Long-Awaited Operating System Upgrade Not Up There with JFK Assassination
SANTA CLARA, CAL. (SatireWire.com) -- In a study hardcore computer enthusiasts find "repulsive and unconscionable," at least 99.9 percent of the general population will have no special recollection of Jan. 4, 2001, the day the Linux 2.4 operating system was finally released.
"It's truly pathetic," said Linux evangelist Eric Raymond. "Not knowing where you were on Jan. 4, 2001, is like saying you can't recall exactly what you were doing on January 22, 1998, right?
For most adherents of Linux -- the open source alternative operating system to Windows and Unix -- life came to a standstill Jan. 4, and thousands scrambled to download the update. However, Stanford University researchers couldn't help but notice the feeling was not universal. "I was driving in my car when I heard on the radio that 2.4 was officially out, and I thought to myself, 'Wow, do I need to pull off the road to regain my composure?'" recalled sociologist and lead researcher Kirsten L. Anders. "And I realized, 'No.'"
That type of reaction galls programmers like Jens Boersk, an IBM system administrator who instantly emailed 75,000 IBM employees worldwide to alert them to the release. "I suggested everybody take the day off, and you know what I got for my trouble? A damn reprimand."
Boersk said he suspects Microsoft bribed people to feign apathy.
Added Raymond: "Oh c'mon
Raymond added that people shouldn't be allowed to use computers if they don't care about what has happened in the world since Dec. 28, 1969. "...What?
I am into the copy and paste.
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.
,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.
:-)
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,..)
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).
Jilles
One day everybody will be upgrading their brains. You'll miss an upgrade session and be told your obsolette. Then you'll find out that a new break through has been developed where you can upgrade for just 10 easy payments of 19.95 with subscription to a frequent upgrade agreement.
Business is simular to a bunch of bullies with a water tank holding koolaide. They put a spiggot on it and charge 5cents a glass. Then they complain about expense and charge 10cents for a half-glass.
I think you want the ELKs distro: try the ELKS homepage.
http://blog.grcm.net/
All the distros expect a modern machine, but this is where driver support is (unsurprisingly) abysmal. No, you can't convince me that driver support for Linux is "great" (though I must say, the fact that it's there at all is damn admirable).
This is what you get when you build an operating system with "platform sanity" as the underlying principle as opposed to raking in as much cash as you can.
I'm not sure where I read this, but I'm sure slashdot linked to it: Linus built his monolithic kernel to deal with the lowest common denominator of processors (despite developing only for x86), while everyone else was optimizing microkernels for a specific architecture, making their work very hard to port. The goal, as I understand it, was not to support as much hardware as possible, but to design the operating system _well_.
What we wound up with as a result is an operating system that scales incredibly well and runs on anything that has a "sane" cpu and 4 mb of ram. The result for me is that I can't throw any hardware away. Sure, my Power Mac 6500 can run Mac OS 8 fine, but it's not terribly useful. Now it is my "high end" server, complete with the _latest_ GNOME 1.4 running over VNC. Sure my Pentium 133 can run Windows 3.1 well, but, well, that was _never_ very useful. Now it's a DNS, mail, and file server. The performance on my G3 running next to my G4 running OS X is just ridiculous, and even my DreamCast can do more!
This results in me saving an enormous amount of money. Forget the fact that Linux is free, even if it cost me $100/seat, I would still save _thousands_ in new hardware. The only problem is that I can't donate my old hardware to people who need it, and my room keeps getting smaller.
Karma: Incomprehensible (Mostly affected by posting at +5, reading at -1, and metamoderating everything unfair.)
Although the linux kernel doesnt take much ram, it can be a mark of how much ram in a system can run it. I remember clearly using slackware on a 386sx with 4 mb ram (version 3.? kernel 2.0.30). I also remember trying a tiny distro called DENU or XDENU with kernel 1.3.x on a 2 meg ram 386sx and it worked fine. I would not try version 2.5 on even an 8 meg machine, at least not with the tools daemons etc that come with it on any distro.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I do however fully understand that not everyone out there makes a great living and can't afford to upgrade every couple years.
So I suppose you have to ask, where do you draw the line between backward compatibility, and keeping those of us with the latest and greatest happy?
My vote would obviously lean more towards the latest technology, and those without the latest would of course lean the other way. So how do we solve this to keep all of us happy?
That's a real question too, because I'm an infrastructure engineer, not a software developer, so I no idea how a developer would go about pleasing all of the people all of the time.
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
At first this seemed like a serious attempt at providing today's Linux to older systems. It's riding on the FSF, which would seem legitimate. Upon reading the FAQ, it seems that the author is more worried about how this distribution is perceived - there's no information on what they are planning to do.
...
..me
Worse yet. If you pop over to the "todo list", you'll notice that most of the line items have to do with advertising for the distribution! Gee
Keep in mind, folks, that is one of the greatest things about being in the Linux world...there are so many distributions!
We have the option of going with a Linux distro that supports our old machines or going with a distro optimized for new machines. Let's just hope Linus does the right thing.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
Too bad it will be the last of the legacy-supporting releases from Red Hat. They have now partnered with Compaq to only distribute future versions (7.2 on) with new Compaq hardware, which I am sure means that legacy support will be going away.
;-)
OTOH, I won't have to worry about upgrading Blackbox, my 10-node Multia cluster
I've installed debian personally on a wide variety of low end machines:
In fact, the computers I work with most are all below the level of a Pentium 150. It doesn't take that much to get linux on them, just be smart about what you choose to install.
Of course, that said, I also have to admit that it would be pretty nice if I didn't have to choose my packages carefully, because the defaults were ultra-slim. It does sometimes take a bit of work if the HD or RAM is too small (one of the funnier error messages I've ever gotten is "Memory size too small to load kernel--2M").
So, props to these guys, and I'll give it a spin sometime, but for now, debian works wonders, and it's pretty well up to date.
There are scads of old "doorstop" computers that could be put to good use, and given to poor people, disadvantaged kids, community centers, schools, etc. Plus, there's a whole world out there beyond the wealthy US, where people are still connecting to the net with old 386s. An old computer is better than no computer, and sometimes an old computer is the only computer.
Personally, I ran an old Pentium with 32MB of RAM, IceWM, Netscape, and a few other apps. For surfing the net, email, chat, and word processing, it was fine- and that's what most people do with their computers anyway.
A few years ago, there was a Canadian organization working on their own Debian-based distro for this purpose, called Learnux. I don't know what happened to it, but it seemed like a neat idea at the time.
Of course, recompiling the kernel gives you a nice coffe break, and do not even try to start Star Office...
However, a desktop distribution with a good selection of lightweight applications would be very nice.
sig intentionally left blank
You can make code that screams on a PentiumI/II/III/IV (While not at "peak" performance, awfully close to it) that also runs completely well and at peak performance for a 386. In fact, it's my understanding that the later versions of Red Hat do this. It's all in the instruction sets chosen and the optimizations taken. Some things in the Pentium instruction set will boost performance over a 386 instruction set choice- but only if you're relying on combined writes to help out or doing vector operations. The combined writes might buy you something with large memory to memory copies, but small ones matter little how you do them. Most servers handle relatively small copies in general. If you're doing a WWW server, as long as it's 386 instructions with Pentium improving optimizations, you're ahead of the game. Same goes for most app servers. It's when you're managing large chunks of data (some database applications, graphics operations, etc.) that it becomes something of an issue.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Some Canadian group had a similar, Debian-based project a few years ago, called Learnux. Seemed like a great idea at the time. I wonder what happened to it...
I don t know why you guys made such an article .. it s only a red hat problem..
.. Not sure to understand the problem.. It s mostly a distributio problem rather than a linux problem
Slackware, DEbian and MAndrake(coming with 8.2 that is in beta release) have a total choice of installation and that can take max 64 Mo.. and the requirement for resources are really low..
I install linux on my pc that is 8 year old and it works fine...sound, graphic, cd...
MAnu
Sometimes, I'd like to run my hardware on an older woman. That would be hot!
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...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Sylpheed - doesn't require gnome/kde and doesn't suck.
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
coyotelinux.com
386SX Processor or greater *
12Mb RAM
1.44Mb Floppy Drive
MDA Display
It's a two floppy LRP derivative that uses the 2.4 kernel.
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
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.
First of all, there is already a "modified" RedHat out there, Peanut linux, which can be installed on more minimal systems. Second, Slackware and Debian, 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.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
The newer versions of the Linux kernel have not run very well on the older hardware. Try running Linux 2.4.8+ on a machine with less than 8mb of ram and it will freeze when you try doing something memory intensive (like bzip2, or kernel compiling).
.. but it works (slowly) on 2.4.7 and before just fine.
:).
I know running large memory apps on a low memory machine isn't fair
Someone suggested to me recently that this was because of the new VM, I'm not a kernel hacker so I can't say. But still, this is a bug that's been around for a long time now and is quite serious... well for people running >8mb machines it is
No idea if it's fixed on 2.5.x.
My old S100, 4MHz Z80, 64K CP/M machine.
I fail to see the point at all of this project. :) - as thats the best way to about improving easy of use imo. Either that, or if they're after a cuddly interface, see if they can adopt the gui of the now defunct progeny debian. for their installer?
its completely pointless.
on their "older computers" - for which one should read "older pcs" as redhat is no longer ported to such architectures as Sparc - surely a text based install is the way to go.I'd go with one anyway, as its generally quicker.
A well written cli is just as easy to use.
They talk about the easy installation options of like "basic desktop" - for newbies. Surely the way to go is write very good documentation for an existing distribution (eg: Debian
Slackware (place version here) installs very easy on old and new hardware. It was pretty easy to do an NFS install (Slack 8) on a 33MH 486 Toshiba laptop (with a very large 250MB harddisk). Maybe it can be done with Redhat, but I'm sure it won't be nearly as easy.
I am still having trouble getting Linux for my older machines.
Nobody has given me a release date yet for punch-card Linux (PCL Linux) for IBM System 370. Damn! I just did the upgrade last year to bring my System 360 up to System 370 specs.
It makes my wonder why I ever got rid of my Univac.
Sam Nitzberg
sam@iamsam.com
http://www.iamsam.com
My (late) monitor expired in my hands after 5 years of faithful service. In a bad moment: I was out of money.
I then got hold of a very old CGA card I had (yeah, baby, C.G.A.) and an yet older monochrome amber monitor. Composite video out, composite video in.
Worked great. At least, I could read my mails (and send my resumé, that's what got me into it, in fact).
I even found a patch (but didn't apply it) by a guy who claimed to improve textmode quality in CGA, along with a buffer for scrolled out lines (you know, Shift-Page Up). Too bad I could not find a driver for X (there's one for the Hercules card, a much better one).
That would be "interesting", maybe in the old chinese motto sense.
Some months after that, I already had bought me a new SVGA monitor, when I got another old computer (also with 32MB like my original one).
I then had two computers and only one SVGA monitor. There it came again to my rescue, the CGA card!
This time I connected both computers via cheap 100MB ethernet and voilà! I was able to run KDE on my Pentium 133 32MB with my older Pentium 100 32 MB as X-terminal.
Talk about cheap junk! OTOH, this is great for taking screenshots.
Then came energy shortage, raised energy bills, government ordered 20% energy cut: the terminal was deactivated.
When I tried to use it again, its old hard disk started to fail.
I also reasoned that using two computers *in that configuration* is somewhat lame. The true geeky objective is to make programs smaller and not getting bigger hardware.
Other than that, if I get another HD (say 1MB), I maybe try that OpenMOSIX thing, which seems waaaay cool. But only if I can get something better than 100MBps... will USB 2.0 be cheap? *Sigh*
Debian is a very slim version of Linux that seems to scale nicely on almost anything - for instance the firewall I have here (that I'm typing this message through) is running on a Sparcstation 10 with a cacheless microsparc and 48 megs of ram with the built in sunlanc and the sun bigmac (quite literally the oddest half duplex 10/100 ethernet card on earth) and I'm loving it.
This is a machine sloaris just barely runs on.
For those who don't know what window manager alternatives are out there, I'd recommend that you check out:
o g/ swm.html
http://www.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~sperling/pr
It is the smallest window manager binary that I have ever seen. It's only about 12KB. The author has good programming practises in that he lets everything be a compile time option--the way it should be.
testing out my trending skills
I have found FreeBSD far faster on older hardware, I have a 486DX 50 32mb mem. 320mb HD that seems pretty quick, even with X. It seemed faster than Linux on the same platform, I haven't benchmarked it to be sure though.
e4 e5
I am currently running an updated 486 @ 100mhz with 24MB ram. running redhat 7.x it runs fine with under 30MB or ram, only problem is its like 300megs of hard disk, with mininmal packages installed. Makes all those 100 meg drives around useless.
this sig is a virus, take it and use it.
LinuxWorx
Spelling errors are intentional as are gramatical error
I do it for the children!
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'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.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Your nick reminds me of a joke I heard once:
Q: Whats bloody and hates sex?
A: A Rape Victim!
Ha-ha!
I just installed redhat on a cyrix 120 with 32 megs of ram (40 gig hd) yesterday and something like this is needed. First I went to the local puter shop and they wanted $60 us bucks for 2 more 16 meg chips so I told them what they can do with their ram chips :P So I installed with 32 megs.
Anyways it took a long time and about 6 install attempts (website says 64 megs needed to install)
but everthing installs ok but there is a serious
problem. In KDE with nothing running but a couple
of background things, the memory usage is
a continuous 30 meg straight line out of 32 on the
monitor. Which basically means that anything at
all I wish to run is running off the swap disk :p
Dont tell me it's not cause it took Konqueror
over 5 mins to load 1 page at kernal.org.
Now windows 98 runs really really fast on this
hardware with the newest I.E. I'd use mozilla
but I think it needs more ram too.
I don't know if it's too late to shrink linux
to run on smaller systems, cause most people
prolly have a lot more ram and bigger cpus.
But like I sayed win98 runs soo smoothly,
on a cyrus 120 with 32 megs ram (cable
modem helps a lot).
I'll prolly try a newer kernal, prolly
end up installing something besides KDE,
and turn off all the daemons I won't ever
need. Not giving up on linux :)
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.
I strongly support any anti-bloat initiative. An insidious effect of rapid technological improvement is a commensurate laziness on the part of programmers, who increasingly overlook fundamentals such the importance of the choice of algorithm.
I get a lot of useful work done with Linux and NetBSD on old hardware. My intranet server (Apache/PHP/MySQL, DNS, netatalk etc) is a SPARCstation 1+ (25MHz; processes typically total around 6MB resident!) I've also run NetBSD on 16MHz sun 3 and 11MHz VAX. All very happily.
In the Linux side, one production file server where I work is a P233 with only 48MB RAM. It's being upgraded as I write - to an AMD K6-2/500 with 256MB, not a cutting edge machine either, but probably overpowered for the job. The 850MHz Celeron machine we use as a colocated web server is sitting at 0.1% load according to Apache (better build that traffic). I might as well use a SPARC 1 (I've successfully tested the biggest database driven site we operate under Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL on a 66MHz '486).
Apart from other 486s and 586s, I've also run Linux on a 25MHz Mac IIci... including X.
My current project is, of course, getting 2.9BSD on to a PDP-11/34.
you had me at #!
"most modern distributions seem to assume that the user has a brand-new machine with processor and RAM to spare"
In other words, open sourcers are getting just as piss-poor as the Microsofties.
It was bound to happen.
Rickster/
radsoft.net