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."
The why is RULE distributed on DVD?
(-;
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.
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
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 &
I agree Linux should not be held back to make it usable on older hardware... but assuming everyone has $300 to blow on a new motherboard/proccessor combo is a pipe dream. I am a college student in the bay area, everything here is expensive. Yes I saved up for a 1GHz box that is sitting under my desk, but I do my school work on that and there is no way I am going to experiment on a production machine and lose my school work.
So what do I do?? I dig out or scrape up old boxes and that is what I play with, I tried loading up RedHat a few weeks ago and watched it crawl on this 200Mhz I have. I am a T-Com student after all.
Don't hold linux back to insure its use on older hardware, but if some people want to get together and spend there time to make it work then don't down talk them. I personaly will be keeping an eye on this project and hope it works. I mean isn't this what Open Source is about anyways? let them make it, and let users decide if they want to use it.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
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).
AMD 1800+ mobo/CPU combo sells for under $300
But the PPro 200 hanging on my wall at home was FREE. As in beer. Which means i could run something like RULE on it to serve the approximately 2 hits per month to my personal web page and use the $300 to buy more beer. The point is, people shouldn't have to spend $300 just to have a decent system while perfectly usable hardware is ending up in the dump.
The only people who need Linux to run on old hardware are the Luddites who refuse to part with their old equipment, and they are nothing but an albatross around the neck of the Linux community
It's not like writing less bloated code is a bad thing. Crapping out code that does stuff is not hard. If Linux was just a bunch of bloatware kludged together to barely work, it would require a lot less effort. (Hell, it'd probably be done.) The hard part is designing a good system, and that benefits everybody.
Older machines generally run cooler than the newest Athlons and P4's. If what you're looking for is a reliable machine to be a firewall, dns, router, print server, etc., then you want reliability. Ever seen a HSF die on a 1GHz+ Athlon? The machine will crash. Hopefully, the CPU will still work once you replace the fan. I've had the HSF on my old PPro 166 go out twice. The machine just keeps running. Oh yeah, it's actually a 150 overclocked to 166. And it's perfect as a firewall router machine. Before I tripped over the power cord, I had an uptime of 158 days. Before that, it was something like 109 days.
Anyway, the new systems are almost entirely the same from the software's point of view. They still use 32 bit PCI and 16 bit ISA buses. Yes, even if you don't have ISA slots, there's still an ISA bus there on the "south bridge" for the serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard port, mouse port, etc.
Access to memory is the same for a P4 as it is for an original Pentium. The instruction set of the processor abstracts access to memory. As long as you can compile a kernel that doesn't use P4-specific or Athlon-specific instructions, then you can run it on an old Pentium (or even an old 386, which is what Linus designed it for, IIRC). And as long as you can compile a kernel that disables drivers for devices you don't have, then you'll be able to use it on an old machine.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
I agree that the type of compromises that people have to make to make software that runs well on older hardware are sometimes less than ideal; things like memory protection, true security between applications, and a nice fancy GUI user interface take system resources; in order to program so that less user resources are used, one either had to give up stability (look at the stability of Windows 3.1 or MacOS from the same era) or user interface (The days of the TWM X user interface).
That said, there are legitimate reasons to have older computers. I remember talking to a technical support rep who had just spent nearly an hour helping a customer run our software on a system with only two megabytes of ram (this was early 1996; 16 megs of ram was the norm; 32 megs of ram cost $350 at the time). I asked him "Why didn't the customer buy more memory?" His reply: "Because she was a single mom." This lady, after feeding her kid and paying for the babysitter, plain simply did not have the money to upgrade her computer.
Another example: Foreign countries. I was recently in Mexico, in an area where the economy was thriving because people earn a whopping six dollars an hour at a Volkwagen factory down there. Now, six dollars does not seem like a lot to the average American. With $20,000 houses and $3 meals at nice restuarants, however, that six dollars can go a long way. One thing that does not change price is computing hardware; in fact, computing hardware actually costa little bit more, thanks to a 15% sales tax (IVA) which Mexico has. I am sure these people would appreciate anything they can do to not have to spend a lot of money on (to them) expensive computer upgrades. (Since labor is cheap, people who finally need to upgrade their computers take their computers to shops where people do motherboard swaps and what not).
Another example is students on universities living on student loans.
Also, from a programmer's perspective, it is often not that difficult to make sure the code runs fine on older hardware. Simpler software, in general, uses less hardware resources.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
...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
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
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 &
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.
I have just accepted a donation for my school district of 32 Compaq Proliant p166 systems. Now should I fork over the cash to microsoft for 32 98SE licences or should I install my copy of Redhat 7.2? I really like this article. I have rescued over a hundred machines for my schools and children that would otherwise never have a computer. I'm using Linux because it is free as in cheap. There is a guy like me in every school district. Some are Macnazi's, some are MCSWannabE, and some, like me, depend on linux supporting old hardware. I have introduced well over 1000 kids in the past 3 years to Linux. They go home to their Macs and winboxes but a few come back and ask me to burn a copy of Redhat for them. For their old boxes. "And by the way do you have any cd drives" they ask. "My computer doesn't have one."
I think I'm doing the right thing.. but then.. I'm a Luddite and nothing but an albatross around the neck of the Linux community
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Good post, but I'd just like to point out that you mean 'developing countries' not 'foreign countries' - the latter includes Europe and Japan, where people are quite able to afford the latest hardware...
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
I think you're right. Trying to work with an old 486 or Pentium 1 with 16 megs of RAM will illustrate your coding weaknesses very quickly. It'll make you pull out unnecessary loops, pull out arrays held in memory needlessly, find better/faster algorithms, and so on. We had an app that did a sloppy recursive database query and it took 20 seconds even on fast servers. Switching to a join required some hard thought from 3 people about how to get it right, but the response time now is nearly instantaneous. Maybe one-tenth of a second. And anyone who has played with Perl knows that foreach will read a file into memory, bogging down the system if it has to swap, but using "while" will fix the problem. Simple coding fixes are possible and can give very real, visible speedups. I don't believe that bloat is necessary -- often it is just the result of a developer doing it the obvious way instead of the way that requires someone to sit down & mull it over for 30 minutes.
And don't forget that the Unix way -- one of the catch-phrases that attacted me to the platform -- is "small tools dedicated to single jobs." We're different from Windows in that regard, and that's good. It's attracts people to the platform.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
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?
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.
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.
You are obviously not unemployed with a very limited income. As a computer enthusiast with very limited money I pick up bits and pieces when possible, just the other day I got a 10G hard drive for my old 166, and because it's Linux, the kernel deals with it :-)
There is also the market for recylced computers, plently of people pick up computers which range from 486s all the way to the dizzy hights of 166s.
Do you want these people to have to use Win95? That's what they get installed on them, and it would be good to offer a Linux alternative.
As a side note, recycle computer places can be great for picking up pieces of hardware which shops can't supply, old ISA network card, different types of memory ect
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
One quick note on Moores law... the MHZ myth.. A 1 gig Atholon doing real time video processing benchmarked at only 17% faster than a K6-3 500mhz. This is hardly a doubling of processor speed. You need to take into account how many clock cycles it takes for a single process. If the 500 takes 2 clock cycles and the 1gig takes 3 the net gain is not a doubling of speed. This unfortunately is what is happening. Although the MHz is increasing on the box the number of cycles per command is also going up, although not as fast. Besides how many clock cycles does it take to teach a child how TCP/IP works? or how to use a spreadsheet? If having the 1800XP makes you feal good... go for it. Frankly as I travel a lot, I prefer to use older and outdated notebooks. They may be heavier but I don't worry about getting a 400 dollar 166 stolen as much as I would a 2500 dollar Viao. (and boy howdy they do get stolen) Yeah a Ferrari may be able to do 200mph but in a 25mph zone a Focus is just as fast.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
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.
True, but if that system is extreme overkill for the task at hand and you have some old bits that you can lash together into something that will get the job done, why not take advantage of the capability?
I needed to set up a print server at work not too long ago. I threw together a system using nothing but junkbox parts: a 486DX2-66 on a VLB motherboard, ISA VGA card and IDE controller, a couple of ISA NICs (it needs to handle jobs from two networks), 32 megs (or was it 16?) of FPM DRAM, a 340MB hard drive, an AT minitower case with power supply, and a downloaded copy of the latest version of Slackware (hadn't installed Slackware on a machine in ages, but it seemed appropriate here). A couple or three hours later, it was up and running. The next day, it took an hour or so to set up print queues and get all the machines in the office set up to print to it.
Total cost to get it running? $1.00, and that was for a CMOS battery from the local surplus shop since the NiCd on the motherboard wasn't keeping a charge. The print-server boxes you can get for $50 won't do what this server does, and why should I have blown upward of $500 on even a "low-end" computer that would've been way more than what was needed?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.