Lightest of the Light Linux

An anonymous submitter writes: "This looks kind of interesting for those who want to run a feather weight Linux on really old hardware."

Comments

What a coincidence

[Valkyre]

I am currently trying to work out PCMCIA support for rh 7.2 on a millenia transport. We have 4 desktops 133=mhz=300 running various daemons, as well as providing heat for our cold feet.

cobalt qube

[Anonymous Coward]

i run a modified version of redhat 4.2 on a cobalt qube. It's 150 mhz and it has 32 mb ram, and works as a great fileserver for 10 users. whoever said you need alot of computing power for a server is wrong

Re:cobalt qube

[Anonymous Coward]

whoever said you need alot of computing power for a server is wrong

sorry that was me, let the beatings begin

Re:cobalt qube

[danamania]

33Mhz, 32Mb and a 250mb HD for my debian web server. It's served about 320mb in 24 hours (across a slow-arsed outbound link unfortunately) not long ago and took things in its stride. RAM usage hovers between 8 and 15mb.

Of course, I do go and post links to it here don't I :).

Re:cobalt qube

[sys$manager]

whoever said you need alot of computing power for a server is wrong

That's a pretty broad generalization to make. You may not need a lot of computing power for a 10 user file server (and anyone who says you do is a total moron) but there are applications for which you do need a lot of power.

I see the mods fell for your troll though.

Re:cobalt qube

[tzanger]

whoever said you need alot of computing power for a server is wrong

Not entirely true, but that's close to what I believe.

I had an old P5-233/64M/SCSI system for an office fileserver. Upgraded the SCSI system to UW2 hardware RAID5 and had all manner of problem. Turned out that the TX chipset couldn't handle the newer PCI bus master. There's now a P2-233 in there but the bandwidth utilization graphs seem to indicate that the CPU is still the bottleneck (the LAN isn't saturated, and the sustained disk I/O could bury the LAN several times over). I think samba is having trouble keeping numerous smaller feeds open than one or two big pipes. Oh well. :-)

Re:cobalt qube

[Anonymous Coward]

The point was that people often use more computing hardware than they need for their specific task.There's no need to go and buy a brand new pc if your going to share a few mp3's or documents with some people. Obviously a website servicing several thousand people is going to need more hardware than a 10 user fileserver.

Re:cobalt qube

[tconnors]

i run a modified version of redhat 4.2 on a cobalt qube. It's 150 mhz and it has 32 mb ram, and works as a great fileserver for 10 users. whoever said you need alot of computing power for a server is wrong

As of this weekend, my 8MB, 33MHz, 2Gig disk, 486 runs debian testing. Good for an NFS link, RAM usage hits 5MB into swap, so all the ssh connections (all 2 of them) sit in swap, and have to be swapped in. But nfs-kernel-server takes bugger all, and doesn't get swapped, because it is kernel, so is quite fast.

Did I mention that the hard disk has plenty of bad sectors? Haven't lost any data yet :)

Re:cobalt qube

[hitzroth]

-1 kinky

Re:cobalt qube

[tconnors]

As of this weekend, my 8MB, 33MHz, 2Gig disk, 486 runs debian testing. Good for an NFS link, RAM usage hits 5MB into swap, so all the ssh connections (all 2 of them) sit in swap, and have to be swapped in. But nfs-kernel-server takes bugger all, and doesn't get swapped, because it is kernel, so is quite fast.


I forgot to mention, the way I do an apt-get install/upgrade/remove, etc is to run apt-get on my 650MHz laptop, in a chroot environment over nfs, with /proc and /dev/ just --bind mounts to the local system (so programs don't barf on not having permissions to write to device nodes, and not having /proc files) :)

Much much faster, concidering dpkg likes to chew through 16Megs of RAM :)

I once did a kernel compile on this machine, years ago, when it was deadrat 4, and nevel will, again.

Re:cobalt qube

[Chromium_One]

How about for a 4-person fileserver?

Had an AMD 386DX40 box, 20MB RAM, 40MB HDD running Slackware 8. Managed to strip the install down to a hair under 20MB with a few system tools, Apache, Sendmail, and a couple userland goodies like PINE. It was running as households' gateway/firewall box to a 512k DSL hookup. Worked pretty well... max uptime was about 6 months (I was out of state for most of that time).

Eventually added another harddrive and turned it into the household MP3 server as well. Worked fine most of the time =)

Re:cobalt qube

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, according to NetCraft you ARE running Debian.
Very nice of you, actually.

Re:cobalt qube

[dasunt]

I've done experiments on my Samba P133/16mhz fileserver before.

With a 10mbit nic, the network is a bottleneck. With a 100mbit nic, the old IDE controller is the bottleneck. I believe with a modern ATA/100 controller, the machine should be capable of saturating that link. [Debian woody, for the curious - Also does NAT, dialup, mail, news and a few other goodies.]

The problem is, old machines can't support a lot of memory. In my case, where I'm accessing gigs of audio and video from the server, it doesn't matter. However, in an environment where the same files are being accessed over and over again, more memory will help performance - and this is where newer hardware shows itself. The latest K7/P4 boards can support a gig and a half or 2 gigs of memory. An old pentium board might have problems with 128. In a small office, it might not matter, but with a heavily used fileserver, it will.

Re:cobalt qube

[facelessnumber]

I was thinking it would have to take an asshole of great magnitude to do that to his server, but I didn't care enough not to click the link. His site's loading rather well even in the face of a slashdotting. I'm impressed.

Re:cobalt qube

[EvilTwinSkippy]

I managed to get RedHat 6.2 on a pair of 486 thinkpads with 12MB of ram. They just boot X and act as terminals for my server. Handy for running a network in a hay field like I do every year at the Philadelphia Folk Festival.

The real trick was hacking the PCMCIA configuration and fooling it into treating my new DLINK PCMCIA cards like it would an older model. Not normally a problem, except you have to do it on the compressed block device on the install floppy.

Re:cobalt qube

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Unless you are running some kind of supercomputing app, your bottleneck is the network card. I laugh when someone drops in a Dual 2Ghz rackmount to act as a file server.

Not too hard of course, I am one of those momos during the day. On the side I do a lot of volunteer work with Linux. You have never seen the light in a peron's eyes like when you tell them the only thing they need for their server is a bigger hard drive.

2 Laptops from Ebay: $120

New Hard drive and case, and a pair of PCMCIA network cards: $200

Old motherboard, CPU and RAM: Free

Being able to tell your wife that you DO actually use those old parts you keep in the basement: Priceless

Re:cobalt qube

[FCAdcock]

-1 for being kinky? +4 kinky is more like it

Re:cobalt qube

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Yeah, but what small office would be trying to run off of a pentium?

Never be afraid to say: Damn this is perfect for my situation.

Re:cobalt qube

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you are running some kind of supercomputing app, your bottleneck is the network card.

Spoken like someone who has never run any real network apps or web services. CPU power is still easily the bottleneck for real world applications. For a file server, mail server? Nope.

Re:cobalt qube

[podperson]

Note: the thinkpad in question runs on a 486DX4 100MHz I believe... Those things were dogs when they were new :p

Re:cobalt qube

[Some Dumbass...]

33Mhz, 32Mb and a 250mb HD for my debian web server.

I recently installed Debian on a similar but lower-memory system (8MB) as a web server (yes, I am going to add more memory soon). Aside from a memory-intensive stage where apt-get was merging some package data, it went smoothly but slowly.

The reason I mention this is that I've seen posts where people say they installed a small linux system on a computer with 4mb of memory "a while ago", and posts where someone has recently installed a small linux system on a computer with 16mb of memory or so, but no mention of really low-memory systems. So I figure that I should mention that a reasonably up-to-date distro (Debian) does install on 8mb, though it'll get ugly at one point if you don't have more like 16mb. Also, perhaps the 4mb Laptop How-To is worth mentioning at this point.

Re:cobalt qube

[haunebu]

Eventually added another harddrive and turned it into the household MP3 server as well...

Only on Slashdot :-)

Re:cobalt qube

[Anonymous Coward]

"He" is a funny looking kinda guy.

Re:cobalt qube

[sg_oneill]

Indeed. I remember once recoiling in horror at an old job I did at the Dept of Justice, when a consultant insisted that for a ten judge lan for fileserving we needed to put in a netfinity thing with 4 800mz processors & a whole bunch of raidy nonsense.
And then he specced 10mbit net cards (Can you still get these days?).
I really just didn't get it.
We put in 100s instead , and it's suffice to say that prior commissioning, it made a *mean* Quake 3 server!

Re:cobalt qube

[apweiler]

and to add another one to this bragging thread-

AMD 486 120 MHz, 32MB RAM, 340 MB disk for booting, 20 GB data drive as fileserver. Not much load though. (runs SuSE 6.3)

486SX-25, 8 MB RAM, 170 MB disk - print server (pizza box-sized machine, that's why I wanted to use it for this) (SuSE 6.3)

486-66 laptop, 8 MB RAM, 520 MB disk - dual-boot of Win95 and Debian 2.2

Install was tricky for the two 8 MB machines - for the first, I installed SuSE on the drive in another box, then put it into the 486; boot of floppy once, run LILO, works.
For the laptop, although Debian 2.2 needs 12 MB for install, I managed to run the standard install by using the 'compact' kernel image for installation.

I would like to ....

[Wild Bill Hickock]

run feather weight Linux on my brand new hardware. Imagine how fast that would be !!!

Re:I would like to ....

[dirvish]

Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of those?

Re:I would like to ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a one-node-cluster of my unshaven face screaming with unbrushed-teeth beer-breathed fury at the latest in a way-too-long string of unfunny references to a dead white guy from Scandinavia! ...

Duh, I flunked lit, so where was the original reference to the classical sense of Beowulf?

Please, please, please, no more clusters or I'll have you all cloistered! and neutered!

Re:I would like to ....

[DocStoner]

Just for laughs one day, I installed Win 3.1 on my 500 mghz box w 7200 RPM HD and 128 meg of ram. Windows loaded faster than the BIOS screen, lol!

Re:I would like to ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just get some reliable old DOS programs and see what a Pentium4 2800 will do. There are several unique DOS programs I find invaluable (still) like Grammatik-4 (IIRC on the version #) and a couple of custom programs for hotrodding (yes, cars.) Also, there was a superb math graphing/solving program called Mercury. Running on a k6-2 450, it DOES perform like a supercomputer of only a few years ago.

These programs are probably ten to fifteen years old, and were relatively fast then on my first 8086 AT2; they fly now, and none of them needs more than about 200kb of memory, all of it low, so they're quite stable.

BTW, has anyone thought of a way to map DOS memory directly to L2 cache onchip or on mobo (as in Socket7?)

Now, that sucker would RILLY, rilly fly!

Re:I would like to ....

[dirkdidit]

The terrorists have won when Windows can boot faster than the Bios POST.

Re:I would like to ....

[nounderscores]

I don't know, uClibc is supposed to have "made compromises" to get compactness over speed. I don't know whether this means using O(cN) where c is a bigger constant over an O(N) time algorithm or whether they went and used O(N^2) instead of O(N). I'd have get off my arse and read the source to tell you for sure.

anyway, if you have a fast machine, you probably would be better off using the algorithm which, say, has more instructions to keep you doing calculations in the most time efficient way than bottlenecking yourself to give you a few kb more available ram.

Then again one of Gordon Bell's laws says that "the simplest way to program something is probably the fastest" so go boot up a featherweight linux on your box, benchmark it and post the results to slashdot! You'd probably make the front page.

Re:I would like to ....

[kungfuBreaks]

>using O(cN) where c is a bigger constant over an
>O(N) time algorithm

Actually, O(cn) and O(n) denote the same class of functions if c is a constant (much like O(1) V.S. O(c) for any other constant c). You are probably referring to the fact that different functions in O(n) may require different constants c and n_0 (s.t. f(n) = n_0).

Re:I would like to ....

[kungfuBreaks]

that should be s.t. f(n) less than or equal to cn for all n bigger than or equal to n_0. Things got screwed up somehow.

Re:I would like to ....

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yes, yes, everyone who's ever had an algorithms class knows that O(c n) = O(n) and that O(c) = O(1). But everyone who's ever written production code also knows that in practice, algorithms aren't O(n) or O(n^2) or some other O(f(n)) where f(n) has all the constants stripped out. They're best described as O(c1 f(n) + c2), where f(n) is n^2 or e^n or log(n) or some such -- and for large, or even not-so-large, values of c1 and c2, and for small, or even not-so-small, values of n, that can make all the difference. O(c n) != O(n) for practical purposes when c = 10 and n = 100. For instance.

Re:I would like to ....

[kungfuBreaks]

I'm not sure I follow you. Obviously just because two algorithms have the same asymptotic time complexity doesn't mean the constants hidden by the O notation don't make a huge difference in practice. How this makes O(n) != O(cn) I don't think I understand. Also, when you're writing production code you don't ususally spend tons of time trying to figure out whether something has compexity 1.5n^2 + 3n - 12 or 2.3n^2 + 2n + 1 (that's the whole point of using O notation, isn't it?). This is a minor point though so let's not quibble about it.

Re:I would like to ....

[Surye]

Any votes as to when these "The terrorists have won when" jokes die out?
And please, don't say, "The terrorist have won when these jokes die"

Re:I would like to ....

[Anonymous Coward]

3) profit!

Re:I would like to ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you shouldn't use the O(n) notation. Because mathematically it is wrong to say O(c n) != O(n).

Re:I would like to ....

[RAMMS EIN]

This is Insightful? I would go with Funny, but definitely not Insightful

Just because a light system runs faster on older hardware doesn't mean it runs faster on newer hardware as well. The reason that light software runs faster is that it occupies less RAM. If RAM is severely limited, this means that it also uses less _swap_. Swapping is slow (easily a factor 1000 slower than core), so less swapping results in more speed. Modern systems come with so much core that swap space is hardly needed anymore (I have 256 MB core and 128 MB swap, and my system uses about 100 MB in normal operation). This means that there won't be any speed gain from running in less memory.

Obviously, there are other factors involved. Vanilla Linuxen tend to give you KDE or GNOME, which are knowm memory and CPU cycle hogs. This is the price you pay for all the eye-candy, ease of use, and other goodies you get. I use WindowMaker, which is fast, uses little memory, is easy to use, and has some nice features like hiding or unhiding all the windows that belong to one app with one command. It works like a blaze on my Duron 900 MHz with 256 MB core, but just as well on my Pentium 200 MHz with 64 MB core.

---
'I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it."
-- Mae West

Re:I would like to ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine ... the death of Beowulf?

Re:I would like to ....

[4of12]

Impressive! I've coded sloppy, but don't think I've yet programmed an algorithm that was exponentially bad like

t ~ e^n

but I will admit to coding occasionally to singularities like

t ~ c_1 * n + c_2 / (n - n_critical)

Re:I would like to ....

[p3d0]

Obviously the constant multipliers in execution time can be more important, in practice, than the asymptotic complexity. However, "Big-O" notation is specifically designed to disregard constant multipliers, in order to understand how an algorithm will behave with widely-varying input sizes.

Big-O has a specific meaning. If it doesn't match what you're trying to say, then just don't use it.

Re:I would like to ....

[the_arrow]

I have 1.5 gig of ram (and 2 gigs of swap), and guess what?

Right now 'free' is reporting 30 megs of free ram... Ok, I have KDE, emacs, a couple of xterms, phoenix, and wine running right now, but still...

Ah well, too bad I still have use for my swap partion, think of how much pr0n I could fit in those two gigs... :)

Re:I would like to ....

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 1.5 gig of ram (and 2 gigs of swap), and guess what?

You must have rich parents

PDA anyone?

[Slashdotess]

I run a light version of linux on my Compaq Ipaq and I think it's great. I can't wait until it becomes good enough to go into pda's full scale and replace proprietary OS's like palm.

Re:PDA anyone?

[Stoptional]

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
--Henry David Thoreau

He really meant to say "Emporers"

Re:PDA anyone?

[Istealmymusic]

I'm curious as to which light version of Linux you are running on your IPaq, my friend has a Palm Pilot and I'm interested in what could be run on it. Was it by any chance ucLinux or one of its variants such as Linux-Lite or Barenaked/Linux (BNL)?

Re:PDA anyone?

[cookd]

I've heard rumors of people getting Palm to run Linux, but I've never seen evidence of success. The Palm lacks certain architectural features, such as an MMU, that make it possible to write a truly powerful multitasking OS. I don't think you'll ever see Linux on the Palm, and if you do, I don't think it will be something you want on your own Palm Pilot.

On a better system, such as an IPAQ, the story can be completely different...

Re:PDA anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

your user name implies that you're either a woman or a man in drag. Could you provide us with your measurements plesae?

Re:PDA anyone?

[BJH]

MMU-less Linux has been around for a while...

Re:PDA anyone?

[fferreres]

What's wrong with PalmOS? It's really usable.

Re:PDA anyone?

[lenski]

(mentioned before) uClinux.

I've seen and worked with companies that built several systems based on it, and it's not a bad way to get Linux-sized flexibility and power in a small, inexpensive package. It was/is straightforward, once one understands system behavior without copy-on-write forking semantics.

A few years ago, a good example of a uClinux implementation was the uCsimm, a 30-pin SIMM sized machine based on the Motorola 68EZ328. 8Mbytes RAM, 2 Mbytes flash, Crystal 8900 (10 Mbit) Ethernet. The 68EZ328 powers all pre-PalmOS-5.0 units. We had a web server with complete CGI capability, as well as several additional communication front-end tools. So I know Linux runs on the 68EZ328, and I've seen references to the Palm H/W in the uClinux kernel code, though I haven't tried it on my Palm...

More recently, uClinux also runs on NetSilicon Net+ARM family processors, http://www.netsilicon.com/

The people who tried to commercialize uClinux (and probably worked on uClibc, though I am less sure of this connection) were Rt-Control, a Canadian company that were subsequently acquired by Lineo: http://www.lineo.com/

I have no relationship with either Lineo or NetSilicon, other than being a (mostly) satisfied customer.

Re:PDA anyone?

[be-fan]

Actually, Linus once did an interview with Boot magazine. He actually said that he never thought that anybody would be able to port Linux to an MMU-less machine, then was surprised to find that somebody had ported it to a Palm. So there you have it, from the man himself. Linux does run on Palms.

Re:PDA anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Compaq iPaq comes with Windows CE installed by default. PalmOS is not an option on an iPaq. However, even still, distributions such as Familiar (check handhelds.org) remain very attractive options on such devices.

Re:PDA anyone?

[ReelOddeeo]

What's wrong with PalmOS? It's really usable.

It is really usable.

What's wrong is

• No source code. This doesn't seem to be a practical problem for development, but it leads to...
• The risk of being locked into a proprietary platform. Don't like the direction things are going? Tough. Shut up and keep consuming content like the other proles.
• Being at the mercy of one OS vendor. They might play nice today, but there are no guarantees.
• Palm has huge marketshare concentrated into a single OS vendor with multiple competing hardware vendors. Could we end up with a Microsoft like stranglehold? "Sorry, I have to run PalmOS, because everyone else does."

Yes, it is really usable. It is well designed for low end hardware of ten years ago, and thus really efficient on today's hardware. I love running PalmOS. I intend to buy at least one more PalmOS machine. But I keep feeling uneasy about the above.

Re:PDA anyone?

[ntp]

I tried the Familiar distro on an ipaq once and the usability was horrible. The package-install-over-wireless was nice but there weren't really any good packages to install. I tried QPE and it occasionally crashed. X worked but there were no usable PDA-type apps.

PalmOS has definately got Linux beat in the PDA arena.

Re:PDA anyone?

[allanj]

A few years ago, a good example of a uClinux implementation was the uCsimm, a 30-pin SIMM sized machine based on the Motorola 68EZ328. 8Mbytes RAM, 2 Mbytes flash, Crystal 8900 (10 Mbit) Ethernet. The 68EZ328 powers all pre-PalmOS-5.0 units. We had a web server with complete CGI capability, as well as several additional communication front-end tools. So I know Linux runs on the 68EZ328, and I've seen references to the Palm H/W in the uClinux kernel code, though I haven't tried it on my Palm...

I'm the (mostly) happy owner of a uCSimm module, and the damn thing works just fine. The Ethernet was really slow on the kernel 2.0.38 based uCLinux that came with it (no DMA - probably a HW issue), but other than that a fine piece of equipment. The whole things runs out of about 700 kb of Flash, and the RAM footprint is roughly the same size - about half of that looks to be buffers for various Linux purposes.

The biggest problem was (and is) that the Dragonball (the nickname for the 68EZ328) has no concept of process isolation (no MMU on these babies), but that's exactly where uCLinux reigns supreme. Kind of makes the Linux experience more DOS-like, in that some stray pointer can damage OS internals. No way of avoiding that on the given HW, I know - but still a considerable headache.

Can someone please enlighten me as to the footprint and stability of the 2.4.x line of uCLinux kernels?

Re:PDA anyone?

[fferreres]

As long as it sycns with my main apps, what would the problem be? I can ditch it and sync to another PDA OS in hours.

And if it doesn't sync with my desktop apps, then there's no way I can use it.

I'd like it be open source if that doesn't mean less revenues for them. I better like several monopolies than 1 monopoly + a buch of rebels like us linux users (because we are, I'd have less trouble using Windows...).

Re:PDA anyone?

[ReelOddeeo]

As long as it sycns with my main apps, what would the problem be? I can ditch it and sync to another PDA OS in hours.

Someone could have made this same argument with Microsoft back in the early 1980's. But nobody recognized the danger.

Imagine. Hypothetically. Palm OS increases market share to nearly 100%. Then they get greedy. They decide that the license alone should cost $70, and that the price should be increased by $10 per year.

Sure, you can ditch one handheld for another. You still pay the PalmOS tax. This scenerio is so similar to the current Microsoft + OEM love slaves that I cannot begin to list the analogies. In fact, I should use the word identical instead of similar.

If I could get the Palm OS from multiple sources, AND the hardware from multiple sources, then I wouldn't mind. I might not mind even if it were NOT open source. No single vendor could hold me hostage. They could not discontinue Palm OS 6 and force me to Palm OS 7 by using incompatibility tricks ala. MS Office. (Hey, some people still run the Linux 2.0 kernel.) A collusion of vendors could still hold me hostage, but price fixing is much easier to proove.

So far, my concerns are all hypothetical. Thank goodness.

As of today, I use and enjoy my Handspring device.

Finally, I would suppose that the API set for Palm OS is much smaller and better organized than the Windows API, and therefore a WINE-like emulator would be doable on top of another core OS should Palm ever turn nasty.

Re:PDA anyone?

[fferreres]

Agreed: try as they might, the risk of getting stuck with a PalMOS monopoly fiasco is very very low (they don't have 30 billion in the bank, and never will for sure!).

By the way, I don't use any Palm app at all. I use ActionNames (Agendus now), Space Trader, Chess Genius and an outliner. I am buying the concept only. I don't think they can monopolice the "Palm" way of doing things. I don't even like Grafitty much (though it works well).

Sweet!

[dirvish]

That should run blazingly fast on my 100 Mhz pc. It currently just displays "operating system not found" upon boot up.

Re:Sweet!

[Istealmymusic]

You're lucky you don't get dropped into a BASIC shell.

Re:Sweet!

[Corporate Troll]

My old IBM PS/2 Model 50 does exactly that. Well, it did... Memory died a few years ago.

From the other end of the discussion...

[xenoweeno]

...how can I "light-weight-o-fy" my existing Debian installation? It's running on a POS Compaq Presario with an AMD K6 233 and 32mb of ram, and even a few copies of spamassassin running will thrash the drive for a good minute and a half. KDE actually "runs", but only in the most comical sense of the term. :-|

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[fishbowl]

Debian is already lightweight. Install the base system and whatever drivers you need. Don't select anything in dselect, and you're done; installs in under 10 megs.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Tetsujin28]

Maybe I'm lucky, or have low expectations, but I run Debian with GNOME on a Pentium 150. Works fine for me. I can surf the Web, read email or do word processing while listening to MP3s on XMMS. Granted, XMMS didn't work very well until I recompiled my kernel.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[MrEd]

...how can I "light-weight-o-fy" my existing Debian installation?

"apt-get remove -purge *", right?

:)

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree strongly! I just (as in last night) installed a basic Debian system. It took just over 200 Mbytes! According to the (out-dated) documentation, Woody takes a minimum of 117 Mbytes (http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch-app endix.en.html). Previously on this machine, I had Debian running on a 30 Mbyte hard drive. I'm glad I upgraded to a 500 Mbyte drive so I'd have enough room for this newer, much larger version. The device driver disks (kernel modules) alone are 14 Mbytes after they're installed. The base files (needed to get lilo installed to get it bootable from the hard drive) are 20 1.44 Mbyte floppies compressed. As I said, at one time I was happy running Debian on a 30 Mbyte hard drive, but those days are long in the past.z

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[helmutjd]

First, ditch KDE and grab a lighter-weight window manager like BlackBox or TWM. Better yet, if possible, ditch X altogether and use the console.

My main network/internet server is a measly ol' IBM Pentium Pro 200MHz. I could upgrade it (I've got several much faster systems gathering dust) - but why?

It handles my light website traffic (a few thousand visits/day) with Apache/PHP/MySQL, and runs Squid, ProFTPd, Qmail, JabberD, and Samba for fileserving to the network... plus whatever I want to do at a console. And it barely breaks a sweat.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[mhesseltine]

It's running on a POS Compaq Presario with an AMD K6 233 and 32mb of ram, and even a few copies of spamassassin running will thrash the drive for a good minute and a half.

I just ran into this on a P60 with 40mB RAM. Try turning off the remote checks. Also, if you're running Exim, there's a setting to control how many simultaneous messages it tries to deliver. Each time it attempts a delivery, it forks a Spamassassin. Try searching Google groups for "slow debian spamassassin" and see what you get.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[odaiwai]

Use the spamd daemon and you won't have constant forking.

dave "sounds vaguely rude"

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[shellbeach]

First, ditch KDE and grab a lighter-weight window manager like BlackBox or TWM. Better yet, if possible, ditch X altogether and use the console.

Actually, E and IceWM work as fast as any on slow hardware. I spent most of 2001 travelling in Europe and took an ancient P120 laptop with me - I tried various "light-weight" window managers (KDE took 5 mins to start up from the login screen (I timed it!) so it wasn't an option) such as blackbox, IceWM, TWM and FVWM, and as far as I was concerned it was E and IceWM that won the day. (IceWM was extremely impressive, starting in just under 3 secs from login in its 'light' form; E took maybe 10 secs, but was still extremely acceptable)

The interesting thing about both of these WMs though is that they're still being used on current, fast hardware as well - unlike TWM - and are actively being developed (although, I don't know if you could say E is being developed "actively" :)

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[pyr0]

Actually, if I'm not mistaken you can just install the base tgz package, which is a fully functional, basic, bootable, root filesystem. You can use this for things like this: http://www.menet.umn.edu/~kaszeta/unix/xterminal/

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Anonymous Coward]

> KDE actually "runs", but only in the most comical sense of the term. :-|

Doh! ..KDE and Gnome are the heaviest and slowest desktop environments around; I'm not surprised your machine is so slow. Go for ROX on top of WindowMaker (or any other light wm) and your hardware will fly again.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[CronoCloud]

Maybe an older version of KDE would run faster. I'm using KDE1 on a machine with a 294 MHz CPU and 32 MB of RDRAM. Got plenty of HD space, 40 gigs. I've tried KDE2 on this box and it's slow, expecially Konqeuror, but KDE1 runs alright. Of course my unusual CPU (R5900) might run some apps more efficeintly than others.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Some Dumbass...]

Debian is already lightweight. Install the base system and whatever drivers you need. Don't select anything in dselect, and you're done; installs in under 10 megs.

I'm not sure I buy that. I just installed Potato on a small machine (486-33, 8M RAM, 200MB HD) and the smallest install I could get was about 50MB. Perhaps I could have removed perl as well for a few more MB (even though it strongly warns you not to), but leaving in all the "required" stuff, and a few obvious tools (like some kind of text editor!) must take up at least 40MB.

10MB would just barely fit the kernel (including the various modules) and the basic set of utilities. It's enough to build on maybe, but it's not a very useful system by itself.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[CH-BuG]

I'm interested. How much RAM do you have ? I must install something similar (web, emails) on a Cyrix P166+ with 32Mb... :-{

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Mark (ph'x)]

this is going to get me modded down in record time, however win2k adv server runs fine on my 366mhz gateway... running IIS, ivrs answering service, serving files, and terminal services (2 users) for irc and winmx and stuff (so i can switch my box off and actually sleep ;)

runs acceptably too, the gui is snappy and responsive, and the only thing ive tweaked is removing alpha effects :)

oh... one thing left to add is a mouse and this stick of ram (64meg) :> ...this will let me boot the solaris virtual machine without vmware complaining too much

my friend isnt so lucky... his gateway is only a cyrix 120 with 64meg ram. nevertheless, win2k runs ok :)

*waves goodbye to karma*

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[gl4ss]

ditch kde/gnome.

and get some more mem. if you intend to run anything graphical else than 1 browser window.
in fact, get more mem anyways, ask around your friends. older mem is surprisingly easy to come by.. i got a bagfull of 'em including couple of 32mb sticks.. 96mb seems plenty for browser/irc/mp3player machine.

icewm is good for 200mmx, maybe some others too.

and get your gfx card settings right, and get a 'decent' card. moving away from integrated s3 to mga did all the difference for me.

anyone know a lightweight windowmanager with beos skin/behauvior?

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Corporate Troll]

That should run just fine. I have a P120 (okay, granted that's Intel, not Cyrix) with 32Meg RAM and I had it running Peanut Linux (version 8.4 - Looks like it's much more bloated now) for over a year without any problems. Of course I recompiled my kernel with just the bare essentials (takes about 2 to 3 hours) and used WindowMaker instead of KDE2.
For surfing just use Opera (or Lynx ;-) ) and for email I can only recommend Sylpheed.

For the moment I ditched Peanut Linux, and went on with Vector Linux, but so far I didn't get X running (not that I tried very long).

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Anonymous Coward]

Weird??!!
I run Debian 3.0 on my old K6/266 + 64MB RAM and it runs Gnome+Sawfish+Galeon very well.
I think you should get more RAM (128MB DIMM SDRAM are cheap!)

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[CH-BuG]

Excellent news, this is exactly what I planned to deploy ! As it is for my mother-in-law, I need to be careful :-)

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Corporate Troll]

Well, it can even play MP3's you know (while multitasking). With a tweaked version of mpg123 that defaults to joint-stereo. It also ran FreeCiv like a champ, and I even had it run Java. Now that last one was a bad idea, so don't do it!
One remark: unless you have better luck than me, don't try KOffice, nor OpenOffice. They are just unusable on such machines. I've never tried Gnumeric and AbiWord, so that might be a good alternate choice.
And yes, better be careful with that Old Dragon ;-)

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[ntp]

Actually you should do:

apt-get remove --purge emacs

That should free up a couple gigs.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[ntp]

> unlike TWM

I beg to differ. I use TWM on my (modern) laptop. It's guaranteed to be installed on any Unix machine so I can get a consistent environment if I need to.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Anonymous Coward]

10MB would just barely fit the kernel (including the various modules) and the basic set of utilities.

No, it's much larger than that! From a newly installed Debian machine:

wireless1:~# du -s /lib/modules/2.4.18-bf2.4
14028 /lib/modules/2.4.18-bf2.4

That's 14 Mbytes just for the kernel modules. You also have to add-in the kernel (1.2M bytes!), utilities (about 5 Mbytes if you work hard), C libraries (1+ Mbyte), etc.. While Debian used to work well on my 20 Mbyte drive, the bloat has now gotten to be over 5 times worse than that! At the rate of increase of 5 times per two years, trying to run Debian will be too expensive for my company before too many of those cycles.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Moloch666]

Heh, you have to use a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Power and network cables should be all that is need for a pure server.

I'm just messing with you, I use win2k for my gaming machine.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Tetsujin28]

I'm interested. How much RAM do you have ? I must install something similar (web, emails) on a Cyrix P166+ with 32Mb... :-{

My P150 has only 32 MB of RAM. I foget how much swap space I have (I'm not on that machine at the moment), but it's not huge. (My Debian instsall is on an 8 gig hard drive.)

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Tetsujin28]

Gnumeric and AbiWord, so that might be a good alternate choice.

AbiWord and GNUCash both work OK on the P150+Debian box I described above.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Corporate Troll]

Thanks for the info, I'll definately try them on the P120.

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[shellbeach]

I wasn't implying that TWM was inadequate - only that (AFAIK) it is not being actively developed (correct me if this is wrong, but I cannot find any information on the internet that suggests that it is, and on the contrary, a lot of information that suggests that it is not!) Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that you'll have to fix any bugs yourself and as X gets more developed you'll probably find yourself losing some functionality. Such as not supporting MWM hints, for eg (try running xmms or any desktop environment - they won't be borderless)

My main gripe with TWM is the lack of virtual workspaces and the above-mentioned ignorance of window hints. I also like having short-cut keys for launching apps when I'm using a laptop, which is one of the reasons for my choice of IceWM. But I'll admit, TWM is a much nicer fallback than having no WM :)

Incidentally, I wouldn't be too sure that TWM will always be around - I notice with amusement that Mandrake 9.0 does not install xterm by default (the package is there, but rxvt gets installed instead, at least for a minimal install!).

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[Mark (ph'x)]

:)

actually i do have a keyboard plugged in, but it isnt needed (i use a util similar to VNC called Radmin), but i have the keyboard plugged in for when i use it as a jukebox (its in the lounge).

needing a directinput mouse is just vmware being gay :/

no monitor... only cabling is power, network, phone (for the ivrs) and audio out. im so proud of it, every bit of hardware is dodgy... the motherboard cant even remember the time, and i can never be bothered setting it, so i can check uptime by looking at the system clock :>

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[fishbowl]

You are not mistaken, and the replies to my original post seem to all be from the point of view of installing the *default* debian distribution. I'm not talking about that at all.
I'm saying, get your kernel to boot through whatever means necessary (I tend to use floppies), and on your filesystem, untar base2_2.tgz. So nowadays it's closer to 50 megs than 10, but it's as lightweight a system (in all resources, not just disk) as linux gets. There is quite a bit that can be deleted from base if you know what you are doing. I think you can shave 16 mb off, just by deleting the locales and conole fonts for languages you don't need.

Now on the other hand, I've actually had a debian install run a 4 GB partition out of space -- all bets are off once you start adding packages. I still think it's a useful exercise to look at base2_2.tgz, and note what it contains. Carefully consider what you need besides that, because it might not be much! SSH, and what else? :-)

Re:From the other end of the discussion...

[fishbowl]

You are referring to the *default* installation, not the base system. Look at base2_2.tgz by untarring it in /tmp or something. It has a lot of essential stuff. If space were truly at a premium, it would be a great place to start.

What you installed that took 200MB was not the base system, but, many packages which (1) supersede some bins and libs in the base, and (2) adds packages that are considered "basic", but perhaps not "essential".

In some instances, all I want is a terminal (the console will do) and an ssh client. With a bit of work, I believe I can make that happen given a debian distribution to start with, in 10 megs. I probably need more than that to install and then delete stuff, but still, it's pretty easy to pare the system down to essentials.

Um...

[miketang16]

Shouldn't someone host a mirror in case we slashdot IBM? =)

Re:Um...

[Istealmymusic]

IBM actually has a quadruple DNS A resource record for maximum load balancing and parallelism in a Class B network spread across none less than 4 /16 subnets. I kid you not:

host ibm.com
ibm.com has address 129.42.16.99
ibm.com has address 129.42.17.99
ibm.com has address 129.42.18.99
ibm.com has address 129.42.19.99
ibm.com mail is handled (pri=0) by ns.watson.ibm.com

So, there are your mirrors!

Re:Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to get out more.

Re:Um...

[jpt.d]

Microsoft beats that...

microsoft.com has address 207.46.230.220
microsoft.com has address 207.46.249.27
microsoft.com has address 207.46.134.155
microsoft.com has address 207.46.134.190
microsoft.com has address 207.46.134.222
microsoft.com has address 207.46.230.218

so does...
timewarner.com has address 64.12.146.40
timewarner.com has address 205.188.238.65
timewarner.com has address 205.188.238.66
timewarner.com has address 205.188.238.67
timewarner.com has address 205.188.238.68

Re:Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its funny because its true. Nice profile, wanna fuck?

Re:Um...

[JourneymanMereel]

> Microsoft beats that...

That's because Microsoft is running IIS on windows so they have all the overhead of a GUI, SMB, WINS, AD, etc. and need to have more machines to get the same effect :)

Re:Um...

[karlm]

Check those addresses... that's 3 /24 subnets for MS and 2 /24 subnets for timewarner.

Re:Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

developerWorks isn't on any of those four IP addresses. Pretty much every section of IBM's site has it's own subdomain. dW is www-106.ibm.com and has one IP (129.33.31.236). Still, I doubt it will get slashdotted. I'm sure they have an unimaginable quantity of bandwidth. And AIX on an RS/* can take pretty much anything you throw at it.

Re:Um...

[Anonymous Coward]

They are nothing compared to my Road Runner connection!

Umm nevermind...

Re:Um...

[F34nor]

Right now the site is not coming up on my machine. Slashdoted? The page cannot be displayed.

Re:Um...

[Moloch666]

Plus they got to be restarted all the time. BSODs patches, and make winders happy.

Been doing this for years

[BurritoWarrior]

I already run a very svelt Linux. it's called SuSE.

Re:Been doing this for years

[Anonymous Coward]

huh?

Re:Been doing this for years

[Grimwiz]

I tried to install both RedHat 7.3 and SuSE 8.0 on my 32Mb libretto and it wouldn't work - I seem to remember hitting insurmountable memory problems. I went back to RedHat 6.2.

Older OS's?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with using an older OS on older hardware?

MS-DOS etc all had X-servers that used little memory + other useful tools.

You'll find little advantage in squeezing linux on really old machines.

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[AndroidCat]

What about networking? Most MS-DOS networking was really butt-ugly.

I'm currently going for a FreeBSD install on an older machine because it has an easy network-bootstrap install.

I did shoehorn Win98 onto a 486/66 for my burglar alarm, but it's not a pretty sight.

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't agree. For fun I installed FreeDOS in a P133. I put in a NIC card and hooked it up to my switch no problem. I even run the Arachne browser on it. Not too shabby. The P133 is pretty high end for FreeDos as it will actually run on an old XT. If you check out the FreeDOS website you will find people who have web servers running on XTs, 286s, and up.

I actually dual boot the P133 into Debian as well. IceWM & Dillo actually are make it quite a snappy setup.

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[AndroidCat]

I did say MSDOS was butt-ugly for networks. Thanks for the tip about FreeDOS, I'll keep it mind.

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[larry bagina]

I did shoehorn Win98 onto a 486/66 for my burglar alarm,

must resist urge to post snide comment ...

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[BrookHarty]

If you use barts boot disk (dos), you can have a floppy install that will will load tcpip and an ssh client. I dont have anything slower than a 486, which was 25 bux at a used hardware shop. Makes a great terminal box.

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[AndroidCat]

must resist urge to post snide comment ...

Go ahead, I'll join you! :^) I only wanted Win98 for MS Agent & text-to-speech, but that's a wash -- not quite enough CPU power.

Lord $Deity, 10 years ago that machine would have been a departmental server. Not enough power?!

Ah well, plan B is FreeBSD and my RS232 text-to-speech card. And besides, the whole burglar alarm thing is just an excuse to have another machine on the LAN.

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[Cyno01]

Win98 onto a 486/66 for my burglar alarm

windows...security... that makes my brain hurt

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I did shoehorn Win98 onto a 486/66 for my burglar alarm, but it's not a pretty sight."

where do you live again?

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[BrookHarty]

What about networking? Most MS-DOS networking was really butt-ugly.

I posted a comment about Barts network boot disk, thought I'd add some info, he currently supports most nic cards and tcp-ip and netbios, even ssh/scp. SSH supports all visual modes, so VI and screen works prefectly. Barts gives you an nice gfx gui to setup tcp/ip with a dhcp option, cant get much easier than that. It even saves your settings on the boot floppy in a config file.

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[AndroidCat]

For the basic functions, I could have used my Micro Coco MC-10. Monitor a reed switch, take keyboard entry, network, trip an alarm relay, even Windows can manage that.

But my cunning plan was to have a talking clippy-type character pop up on the screen and annoy any burglars away. ("You seem to be trying to break into the apartment...") I'll just have to make do with a wonderfully robotic text-to-speech card. I might still keep Windows on that machine, FreeBSD on others.

The networking part is so that when he switches that machine off, he gets a surprise. ("No Jacque, not this dam...")

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[EvilTwinSkippy]

Too Late

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[doormat]

I did shoehorn Win98 onto a 486/66 for my burglar alarm, but it's not a pretty sight.

Well, at least we know your burglar system always locks up.

Hah! I kill me!!

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[alphaque]

and if you're looking at small/lightweight installations, like what the slashdot article was mentioning, you'd do good too check out PicoBSD. It's been used on 486 boxes with as low as 4MB RAM, though 8MB is recommended.

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[ray-auch]

Linux is perfectly good for old machines - I ran Linux with X11, Emacs, GCC, etc. etc. for many years on 386s and an early 486 (16M ram).

Also, what constitutes "older OS" - IIRC I was running custom linux (floppy +some apps off nfs) disks for turning 386s into X terminals 10 years ago. That's certainly not a young OS.

Re:Older OS's?!?!

[AndroidCat]

Ha! Too slow! I just scrubbed Windows and installed Linux (Ye olde Slackware 2.1). FreeBSD kept hanging on initing the ISA, and I had the CD handy, so why not?

Sure, it's an old insecure copy, but how secure does a burglar alarm have to be? (You know what I mean. :^)

Funny how the machine suddenly went from feeling like a wheezing basketcase to more like a mainframe...

Mini-distros

[erik_fredricks]

There are several small distros designed to run on older hardware. Some, like tomsrtbt and coyote can run directly from a floppy, with no need for even a hard drive. Many of these started life as glorified rescue disks, but with the modular nature of Linux, it's possible, for example, to run a working mail-server on an old 386 with them.

Re:Mini-distros

[Istealmymusic]

Wait a minute...you say "no need for even a hard drive" and then "it's possible [...] to run a working mail-server on an old 386 with them". Where would you store your mail queue, on a RAM drive or NFS partition?

Re:Mini-distros

[yomegaman]

You'd keep the mail on the 5-1/4" B: drive of course! We *are* talking about old computers here, right?

Re:Mini-distros

[weeerdo]

hard drives are supported but not required.

Re:Mini-distros

[Cyno01]

Yay! Someone brought up Coyote, I use CoyoteLinux on a 386 with some old network cards as a floppy based router. It works, i shit you not.

Re:Mini-distros

[theLOUDroom]

As do I.
Tiny linux distros work great for do simple tasks with hardware that would otherwise sit in your closet. I use an old P100 with a couple network cards in it as my router.
It works great:

coyote# uptime
03:29:25 up 19 Days (463h), load average: 0.00 0.00 0.00

It's been 19 days since I put it on a UPS :)

Re:Mini-distros

[Anonymous Coward]

My Coyote Linux has been running continuously since I got my DSL connection over 3 years ago, except for power outages (even then it recovers like a champ!). It runs on an old Compact 60MHz Pentium with 12MB RAM, 2 network cards and one floppy.

Re:Mini-distros

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's a computer with a B: drive, then it's probably a double-density 360k one.

So I guess if you were a commercial ISP and wanted to set up a separate mail server for each user, I guess this would work.

Re:Mini-distros

[ryanvm]

He probably just means an SMTP relay. Although, I wouldn't necessarily call that a "working mail server".

Feather weight OS's

[AcquaCow]

I think it would be really nice if for once, operating systems tried for a lighter approach to their installs. I know most unixes provide base, custom and full installs, but perhaps someday MS would like to try a light install. Give me XP w/o the Fisher Price colors, w/o the various menu display methods. Stop trying to sell your OS based on features that should be optional. Start trying to sell your OS because its good, not because it has 300+ ways of displaying the same thing. Do something and do it right damnit.

-- AcquaCow

Re:Feather weight OS's

[ni5mo]

Try LitePC. They have a product called 98lite which allows selective install all non necessary os components, as well as 4 pre-defined install sizes. Their micro option can install win98 in under 50MB. It also allows you to replace the gui with the win95 interface for even more speed.
They are currently working on win2K-XP version, but work is understanably slow.

Seriously, check it out!

Re:Feather weight OS's

[AcquaCow]

Yeah, I played with 98lite for a tad. Quite nice. The thing is, third parties need not do this. The maker of the OS needs to do this.

-- AcquaCow

Re:Feather weight OS's

[ni5mo]

Absolutely! The OS makers have much more at their disposal to make this happen (source, developers etc.)
I guess they don't see the monetry benefit of expending resources on it, when the majority of users don't have a clue (or probably care for that matter).

Re:Feather weight OS's

[AcquaCow]

It could even be cost beneficial to the makers due to the fact that they if they really wanted to, they could sell customized versions of their software to specific audiences. I'm sorry, but just because you have a "desktop" and a "server" version of your OS doesn't make you special. Last I checked the "server" versions contain all the bloat from the "desktop" version that is totally undesirable in an actual server.

-- AcquaCow

Re:Feather weight OS's

[ni5mo]

What ever happened to that embedded/modular version of windows that was supposed to be in development? I haven't heard anything about it since it was mentioned in the anti-trust case. If it's still around, it sounds like they have done it, but can't be bothered/don't want to make it available.

Re:Feather weight OS's

[Anonymous Coward]

90-what percent of OS sales for Microsoft is due to the sale of a new compter?

Re:Feather weight OS's

[AcquaCow]

perhaps...but if no one sees it, does it exist?

-- AcquaCow

Re:Feather weight OS's

[ni5mo]

hehe...
zen and microsoft don't mix :)

Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.

Re:Feather weight OS's

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP Embedded? Expensive, though, but is _is_ componentized. Probably not meant for end-users...

Re:Feather weight OS's

[sql*kitten]

perhaps someday MS would like to try a light install. Give me XP w/o the Fisher Price colors, w/o the various menu display methods

That's pretty much what runs on the X-box, isn't it?

Don't run a GUI for a start.

[AltGrendel]

Trim any and all services, cut it down to the bare bones.

Real sys admins use a command line anyway (JOKE).

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[clunis]

This is a joke? Delete any of the X11 poop if it somehow got installed, turn off inetd, kill and delete anything that isn't part of the machine's intended use, remove any unnecessary hardware, strip down the kernel ( if necessary ) and boot scripts, patch, use something like radmind to push this out to all of your machines, and then monitor.

This is exactly how I run my servers.

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[danamania]

Real sys admins use a command line anyway (JOKE).

IMHO It's not such a bad joke to run a machine command-line-only for a while, or permanently. The greatest service you can do to your general knowledge of all things computing, is use a broad range of machines/interfaces outside your common experience. When I started with linux, I just accepted it was mostly commandline stuff (that was a year ago) - and for my uses, it mostly still is. I've run PCs, Macs, Linux from only a command line, Linux with a GUI, Amigas, Dos, Windows, Netware - a bit of everything.

Jump into the command line-only thing for a while. run something lightweight on a 486 and enjoy the learning experience :)

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[Alien Being]

"Delete any of the X11 poop if it somehow got installed"

He should leave it installed unless disk space or security are the issue. Even if he can't afford the ram/cycles to run an X server, he can display apps remotely when he needs to. But really, he should install some more RAM and give the poor disk drive a break.

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[Anonymous Coward]

there's a greater chance he'll get laid by Ellen Fiess than he'll need to run an XWindows program remotely.

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[Anonymous Coward]

do you also recommend people hang out at interstate restrooms and give blowjobs to sweaty truckers? After all, that's probably "outside your common experience" (unless you're name is Rob Malda).

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[Istealmymusic]

there's a greater chance he'll get laid by Ellen Fiess than he'll need to run an XWindows program remotely.

But if he does, he should get it tight.

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[rutledjw]

I thought inetd was required so that the machine could resond to incoming connections. But I just killed inetd and tried to ssh the box and guess what happened?

It worked...

OK, so I'm confused. What is inetd really used for? I assume the reason this worked is that I had an ssh daemon running. Is that right? inted is used to respond to incoming connections when there isn't a daemon already running.

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[LordWoody]

The (x)inetd is a daemon designed to run in the place of many daemons. It listens on selected ports and when it gets a requests that fit within certain rules, it spawns the actual service to hadle the request. It saves memeory since you can run one daemon full time instead of many. Plus it makes control of those daemons easier.

SSH can be run from inetd, but rarely is unless it is really used that infreaquently. This is for both performance reasons. ssh also handles its own security considerations, so you get little from placing it in inetd.

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[Clover_Kicker]

>OK, so I'm confused. What is inetd really used for?

Read The Fine Manpage.

$ man inetd

INETD(8) OpenBSD System Manager's Manual INETD(8)

NAME
inetd - internet ``super-server''

SYNOPSIS
inetd [-d] [-R rate] [configuration file]

DESCRIPTION
inetd should be run at boot time by /etc/rc (see rc(8)). It then listens
for connections on certain internet sockets. When a connection is found
on one of its sockets, it decides what service the socket corresponds to,
and invokes a program to service the request. After the program is fin-
ished, it continues to listen on the socket (except in some cases which
will be described below). Essentially, inetd allows running one daemon
to invoke several others, reducing load on the system.

Re:Don't run a GUI for a start.

[sweepkick]

Not to mention that once you get proficient in controlling the machine from a command line, you may find that for just about any task w/r/t machine administration it is faster, easier, and more elegant than configuring from a gui. Especially when it comes to automation of mundane tasks. YMMV.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

the parent is about making linux lightweight on old hardware. the article is about making linux lightweight on old hardward. wtf is 'offtopic' about it?? i want to know about making debian thinner too (dont want to lose apt-get)

Comparison

[IceFox]

Can someone with more knowledge give me some more info on the differences between DietLibC and uclibc? As in how much I save in binary size for both of them. Problems (something like it wont support translations is a big thing) such as feature Y wont work. Can I compile Gnome or KDE with them? I read the FAQ and both seem wonderfull and I really don't see why someone _wouldn't_ want to use them. So why wouldn't I want to use them?

-Benjamin Meyer

Re:Comparison

[Vilim]

If you are compiling KDE or Gnome on them then there is probably no need to use a version of glib with less compatability as you would have more than enough resources for glib if you are intending on running KDE or Gnome

Re:Comparison

[be-fan]

Glibc is pretty fast. In order to save memory, uclibc makes concessions that potentially hurt speed.

Re:Comparison

[serial frame]

uClibc is a very complete glibc replacement; it uses the latest glibc headers to maintain this compatibility. Besides this, where it differs from diet libc is that diet-libc does not have a dynamic linker.

In short, do not even attempt to build GNOME or KDE against diet libc. Many parts of GNOME and KDE depend on a dynamic linker. So, your best chances would be with uClibc, as it already has a native gcc toolchain available, a native dynamic linker (though not for all platforms supported by uClibc), and has more 'diverse' features which diet libc may be missing.

Re:Comparison

[captaineo]

First you have to understand that the main design goal of glibc is code bloat. (I'm not kidding, static hello-world.c is >100KB). A lot of this is because glibc tries to support a large API, most of which is never used by most programs (e.g. locales). Also, glibc tends to lump lots of stuff into individual object files, so the linker does a worse job of discarding unused code. (the first call to printf() in your program pulls in tens of KB of stdio code)

The concept of uclibc and dietlibc is to support the 10% of APIs that 90% of programs use, and to behave better with static linking. uclibc makes some sacrifices to work better with glibc-based software (I don't have exact numbers since I don't use uclibc). dietlibc goes completely to the extreme; anything that can be cut is cut, and object code is carefully divided so that static executables only include the code they really need.

For concrete examples, see the static binaries compiled by dietlibc's author at ftp://foobar.math.fu-berlin.de:2121/pub/dietlibc/b in-i386
(cat is 3KB, tar is 63KB, the thttpd web server is 42KB - add them up and you are just about equal to hello-world.c with glibc). Compare these with the sizes of even dynamically-linked glibc binaries on your own system.

The reason you wouldn't want to use a cut-down libc for something like Gnome or KDE is that you'd have to recompile your entire system, including the X libraries and all other dependencies. (you can't use your existing X libraries since they are already linked to glibc). Along the way you are sure to run into one or two obscure C library APIs that only glibc implements.

I think eventually there is a chance that glibc will be replaced by one of the cut-down libcs. The degree of bloat in glibc is simply obscene, and on top of that there is the backwards-incompatibility problem. (many packages broke during the transitions from 2.1 to 2.2 to 2.3, which should never have happened with a stable thing like the C library). Linus himself has even floated this suggestion on the LKML. The question that remains is whether the full glibc API can be implemented without creating another bloated monster. (there is no real alternative, since glibc's API has been enshrined in the LSB already...)

On a similar note, I'd love to see GCC drop the problematic GNU STL for STLport. In my tests STLport has about half the cost in compile time and code size...

Re:Comparison

[dvdeug]

So why wouldn't I want to use them?

Glibc is optimized for speed and standards compliance. It's also what Gnome and KDE and everything else on Linux is tested with, and has vastly more testers. I had 128 MB of RAM on this box when I bought it four years ago, and it wasn't top of the line. What's a half of MB of memory, especially as it cost me less than $50 to upgrade it to 384 MB?

I just ran memstat on my box. I'm running a konsole, and mozilla and emacs. Glibc is pretty far down on the list of memory wasters. Mozilla takes up 22 MB; xfs 15 MB; QT 5 MB; Emacs 3 MB; bbkeys 5 MB (I smell a memory leak); libkio 2 MB; 1.2 MB for each of libgtk and libkdecore. Deep down in this list is glibc, taking up just over 1 MB. If you're going to be running Gnome and/or KDE, glibc is not your memory waster.

Re:Comparison

[dvdeug]

First you have to understand that the main design goal of glibc is code bloat. (I'm not kidding,

But you've got to be kidding. It is a simply absurd statement. I don't think you understand the situtation, because to understand the situation you would have to know what the real design goals of glibc are and how they affected the library.

static hello-world.c is >100KB)

Okay, and how big is dynamically linked hello-world.c? There aren't that many reasons to statically link a program. There may be some on reducing program size, but I would think Emacs and OpenOffice and Mozilla - the many megabyte executables - would be much more interesting than 100KB.

most of which is never used by most programs (e.g. locales).

How do you measure that? Every program that's not a server needs to be using locales; returning localized messages and sorting information the way the user would expect it are two big things.

The degree of bloat in glibc is simply obscene, and on top of that there is the backwards-incompatibility problem.

What exactly is an obscene amount of bloat? I have QT, GTK, 3 KDE libs and 2 Mozilla libs loaded into memory, each of which is larger than glibc. Why should I worry about the 8th largest library open on my system?

The uclibc people understand that they were trading speed and standards-complance for size, and know that it's not a good tradeoff for everyone. Do you really understand what tradeoffs were made in glibc, well enough to make a better library?

The reason why there's the backward compatibility problem is two-fold; first, people keep trying to link directly to glibc's internals, and not changing those would be a pain, and second, you want to make major improvements, but changing the libc major number is a flag day, so they try to support old stuff while making major changes, with some success and some failure.

The question that remains is whether the full glibc API can be implemented without creating another bloated monster. (there is no real alternative, since glibc's API has been enshrined in the LSB already...)

There is no real alternative, because most of glibc's API comes from POSIX and Single Unix Standard (SUS), or from traditional BSD functions.

Re:Comparison

[Permission Denied]

backward compatibility problem ... people keep trying to link directly to glibc's internals

Can you give some examples? I've been using non-glibc systems almost exclusively for the past couple of years (FreeBSD, Solaris), and all the latest open source stuff compiles just fine, except maybe for a few header tweaks on some programs that were only tested on Linux.

Re:Comparison

[dvdeug]

Can you give some examples?

The two things that come to mind are jdk1.1 and libtricks, a library to change things by wrapping libc.

Re:Comparison

[olethrosdc]

"Okay, and how big is dynamically linked hello-world.c? There aren't that many reasons to statically link a program. There may be some on reducing program size..."

I am afraid I do not udnerstand - how can static linking reduce a program's size? I'd think it does the opposite. No? Unless you mean, reducing the amount of memory the program takes up when it runs. In that case, that yould only be true if a single instance of a program that was dynamically linked to glibc would be running. Considering that everything out there uses glibc, I think it is really cool that you can just dynamically link it and save memory. Yes?

In my book static linking is always a big no-no, unless the libraries you use are not meant to be used by other programs anyway. Which is sometimes true for in-house stuff. But we used to make all code re-entrant and available as dynamically-linked shared libraries from the outset. Made things easier.

Re:Comparison

[dvdeug]

I am afraid I do not udnerstand - how can static linking reduce a program's size?

I'm sorry; it wasn't very clear. I meant to say

There aren't that many reasons to statically link a program. There may be some reasons to worry about on reducing program size[...]

Re:Comparison

[Arandir]

What I've never figured out is why they don't simply split up libc/glibc/uclibc/etc into separate libraries like it should be.

The Standard C Library should be a distinct library from the rest of the stuff. The reason they're together is historical. They don't need to be together today.

IBM provides a stable home for "little linux"

[stanwirth]

Great! but as tiny linuxes go, ramf has support for Reiserfs, and a lot of people I know rely on tomsrtbt . Almost all of the information in the IBM page submitted here is already available, but it's really nice to see IBM providing a stable home for this type of information -- while the original linux from scratch server flounders (was it those big bandwidth bills from being /.ed did it in?) and the first cool rescue thing I used, cclinux, has all but disappeared. sigh!

So thanks, IBM. This time.

Re:IBM provides a stable home for "little linux"

[awx]

cclinux!! I loved that, it came with full root tarball and a compile script, it was -so- easy to chop bits out that you didne need and put your own stuff on there. I *really* wish i'd kept a copy.

Re:IBM provides a stable home for "little linux"

[1%warren]

was it those big bandwidth bills from being /.ed did it in?

LFS was hosted by VA Linux Systems - the people that own Slashdot.

386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port

[czaby]

Once I had a happy linux on a 386SX-16MHz very old laptop, without any working hard disc.
The floppy was enough to boot it, 4 Megs RAM is perfect for a small kernel, some shells and telnets, everything else (even the swap) comes through PLIP on the printer port.
It was much funnier than my VT420 terminal :)

Re:386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port

[czaby]

And of course I was able to compile the kernel on it for itself!
Took several hours, but it worked :)

Re:386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port

[AndroidCat]

I ran a multi-user BBS on a 386-25 with 8M ram. Two phone lines, console, virtual consoles, and telnet from the Windows box. Slackware Linux (1.2, 1.3?)

I might haul that CD out for my 486-66 32M ram, which is being used as a burglar alarm. (Hey, I need some platform to plug my old ISA cards into.) With all the bugs in the software, I'd never put that machine on the Internet, but on the LAN, who cares?

Re:386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port

[Anonymous Coward]

I am using a 486/DX33, 4MB ram and about a 500MB hdd as my cable modem router, right now. It is currently running NetBSD 1.5.3, ipfilter, ipnat, and that's about it. 5 running processes. I still get full speed from my cable modem to the LAN (top speed for my cable deal where I am is about 500Kb/sec from local sites).

Logging into it is slow of course. But why would I need to log in? It just passes and drops packets like a good little firewall/router.

Re:386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port

[Anonymous Coward]

NetBSD rocks! License sucks, but what can you do . . . .

Re:386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port

[Anonymous Coward]

look a hapless troll
no one catches on his hook
readers read in peace

Re:386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port

[apweiler]

Swapping via PLIP? That sound extremely painful... worse than swapping off a 5.25" floppy drive, which I once did. And compiling a kernel on that? I'd guess days, if not weeks, rather than hours...

Re:386SX16, 4M RAM, no HD, parallel port

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds interesting. Is the PLIP stuff completely in the kernel? I'm thinking about what would happen if the kernel decided to swap out some of the stuff you need to get the connection.... :-)

uClinux + busybox

[toybuilder]

A lot of the thanks should go to the work by uClibs and Busybox maintainers. Trimming the kernel is important, but the big savings in size is indeed the small footprint of the C libraries and the "combined" busybox binary.

How much space saving? Well, at my work, we initially prototyped some programs that ended up at around 1 MByte, statically linked to glibc. The same program was 120K after statically linking to uclibc, and then 35K after dynamic linking to uclibc.

I know there's various individual efforts out there to re-build Debian around uclibc. Imagine being able to put a full-featured Debian package on a business-card-sized mini-CD's that you can always keep in your wallet!

Re:uClinux + busybox

[Istealmymusic]

Imagine being able to put a full-featured Debian package on a business-card-sized mini-CD's that you can always keep in your wallet!

I love it already. If I'm over at a girl's house I can pop it into her box when she's not looking and show her the wonders of Linux!

Re:uClinux + busybox

[tzanger]

How much space saving? Well, at my work, we initially prototyped some programs that ended up at around 1 MByte, statically linked to glibc. The same program was 120K after statically linking to uclibc, and then 35K after dynamic linking to uclibc.

Yup, uClibc is pretty sweet. I use it and busybox for my CF firewall boxes. 2.4 kernel, ipsec, iptables, Perl, an XMLRPC daemon, IDS and some duct tape scripts in just over 8M. Perl is taking up most of that but if I need to bust out some complex scripting to get something done, it's there.

Re:uClinux + busybox

[.milfox]

Shouldn't you be popping something else into her box instead? Something a little bit more, ah, interactive?

Yeesh. :P Youse slashdot geeks.
</joke>

(tags inserted for the humour impaired)

Re:uClinux + busybox

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm over at a girl's house I can pop it into her box when she's not looking . . .

Dude, that's just wrong.

~~~

Re:uClinux + busybox

[Anonymous Coward]

You stole my joke. I invented it, you just made the punchline more obvious. Think you're the only one than recognized similarities of a Debian ISO stored in your wallet and something else?

Thanks for spoiling my joke. Bitch.
-Istealmymusic

Re:uClinux + busybox

[Anonymous Coward]

1 MByte, statically linked to glibc. The same program was 120K after statically linking to uclibc, and then 35K after dynamic linking to uclibc.

Err... wouldn't it also have been 35K when dynamically linked to glibc? A sprinkle of FUD with your numbers?

Re:uClinux + busybox

[njchick]

Yes, Knoppix is much friendlier, although it requires a full-size CD, not a business card.

Re:uClinux + busybox

[Anonymous Coward]

you suck at life.

Re:uClinux + busybox

[Anonymous Coward]

Old joke.

(they're holding a 'spanish fly' container)
[Butt-Head] hey beavis, if you like, obstract the chick, then i can like, stick it in her taco
[Beavis] no way butt-head, you have to give her the spanish fly first.
[Butt-Head] what the hell do you think i'm talking about, buttplug?

- Beavis and Butt-Head, "Spanish Fly"

Re:uClinux + busybox

[yomegaman]

You didn't used to write for "Three's Company" did you? I can just picture Janet overhearing Jack talking about "popping it into her box."

Re:uClinux + busybox

[denny_d]

I was thinking the same thing. Knoppix is pretty darn cool. Roll your own _portable_ OS AND apps etc. Hook into your ftp server to access the stuff you need and you're good to go on any machine with a CD and an internet connection. Make it as small as possible. Why hasn't that happened yet?

Re:uClinux + busybox

[njchick]

Hook into your ftp server to access the stuff you need and you're good to go on any machine with a CD and an internet connection.

... and enough memory to unpack the downloaded stuff into. Maybe you are suggesting to use empty space on the hard drive? I wouldn't risk it with NTFS.

Re:uClinux + busybox

[xenocide2]

When she's not looking though? Time for a new law against stealth rape.

Re:uClinux + busybox

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, he's going to put Woody in her! For you pervs out there, that's Debian Woody. *Cough*

Re:uClinux + busybox

[jshare]

Don't feed the trolls.

Re:uClinux + busybox

[toybuilder]

Heh - I guess I left out an important bit of data...

We built static glibc because we couldn't fit the glibc shared libraries on to our fs -- glibc libraries totaled to 11 MB. uClibc's libraries totaled to 1 MB.

My embedded system just had enough room to store about 4 MB of files. That made using shared glibc impossible, and statically-linked glibc usable for a few programs. After uclibc, we crammed in a heck of a lot more programs.

Mind you, there are other solutions to cramming the code. There are library "reducers" (I think they're called?) that will analyze a collectino of programs and build a partial glibc that only contain routines used by your programs.

Re:uClinux + busybox

[OrangeHairMan]

Imagine being able to put a full-featured Debian package on a business-card-sized mini-CD's that you can always keep in your wallet!

It's called LNX-BBC. Debian-based bootable CD in less than 50 mb, perfect for putting on a business card CD. I carry it everywhere I go.

And get the nightly builds, their last stable release is a year old.

Orange

Re:uClinux + busybox

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, wouldn't the size of the dynamically linked executable be the same regardless of which lib you use?

There is very little point in optimizing glibc for making small statically linked programs, simply because glibc is so common and so many programs use it that there is no point linking glibc statically in the beginning!

Re:uClinux + busybox

[toybuilder]

It depends on what you want to do -- but when you are running on a resource limited platform to run only a handful of programs (as is often the case with embedded systems), the memory footprint of the shared library does matter.

Also, it turns out that glibc and uclibc have different startup code, and the startup code for uclibc is smaller than that for glibc.

FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

From the FreeBSD handbook:

3.4. What do I need in order to run FreeBSD?

You will need a 386 or better PC, with 5 MB or more of RAM and at least 60 MB of hard disk space. It can run with a low end MDA graphics card but to run X11R6, a VGA or better video card is needed.

Re:FreeBSD

[dokebi]

Once I set up a small FBSD server (486-66 /w 8 megs of ram, before I upgraded to 40megs) that could saturate 10megabit ethernet on its own, while doing full packet inspection. Who needs a Pentium? :)

low resources

[oh]

On the resource side, I had 12 MB of memory and a 540-MB hard drive to work with.

My first linux install was a 486DX2, witn a 66Mhz chip, 4Mb of ram, and I was installing onto an 80Gb hard drive.

Before this sounds like a "When I was a Boy" story, I could install X and gcc, but not at the same time. When I say I could install X, it would run ... If anyone knows the screensaver "flame", I couldn't get it to update faster then once every 5 seconds, no matter what I tried.

Just because something is possible, doesn't mean you want to do it.

Re:low resources

[BitHive]

What kind of mainboard for a 486 would support an 80GB disk?

Re:low resources

[Anonymous Coward]

ide card?

Re:low resources

[CableModemSniper]

No no, no he said 80Gb. Which is Gigabits...which is..::some calculations::...10MB? (somebody feel free to correct my math if its wrong)

Re:low resources

[zuralin]

he also said 4Mb of RAM.. which is megabits (according to you).. so are you saying he was trying to install it with half a meg of ram? obviously he meant a 80MB hdd, or so id assume

Re:low resources

[oh]

Opps.

0,$s/GB/MB/g

Mind you, it handled the 4GB disk quite well, once linux booted. Of course, it had a bit more ram then.

Re:low resources

[lucifuge31337]

3rd Party IDE card, Ontrack or similar translation software, SCSI devices, etc, etc, etc.

Re:low resources

[dasunt]

As long as the bios can see enough information to boot linux, the linux kernal can access any disk, independent of the bios. I have an 80 GByte disk in my pentium 133, and the bios refuses to see it, but has no problem booting since the boot partition is on a smaller 1 Gbyte disk, which then mounts the 80 gigger as /home

Re:low resources

[CableModemSniper]

I know he meant an 80MB HDD. I was like, other users who posted before me, making a little joke as regards his typo.

Re:low resources

[Anonymous Coward]

Newer distros just dont fit in less than 16-32MB ram, so I had to use a 2.0.x kernel on my linux box

Re:low resources

[p3d0]

Did you know that you can use "%" instead of "0,$"? In vim, see ":help :range".

You, in particular, could use it like this:

:%s/Opps/Oops/g

Re:low resources

[oh]

I'll have a look at that. Does it work in ed? (don't laugh, I have to use that sometimes)

Re:low resources

[p3d0]

Try man ed:

%: The first through last lines in the buffer. This is equivalent to the address range 1,$.

Use Busybox in all distributions

[Istealmymusic]

Why can't Busybox be used for regular, 24/7 server use? It seems to provide all the necessary building block utilities one would expect in any Unix distribution; I'm up for it replacing /bin/* completely.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[DarkOx]

I use busybox on my ipaq in familiar linux, its a great solution for that application. Certain applications in it like ps, for instance does not display as much info as the real gun/ps will. Busy box is great when you NEED small but where you have plenty of room the normal utils are more featureful.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[tzanger]

Why can't Busybox be used for regular, 24/7 server use?

While busybox is great, it does not use many GNU command line options, and many features are missing from the utilities in addition to that. awk, sed, grep -- none of these will work at all for autoconf-style development. tar has some options missing, I had some strange problems with vi (can't backspace?!) and find is missing almost every option -- my CF-based firewalls use GNU's findutils, grep and vim (tiny version) instead of the busybox builtins.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[Istealmymusic]

I can see your point, but is there any reason why BusyBox cannot be as full-featured as the stand-alone utilities? If certain informations take excessive amounts of code to calculate, #define's could be used in case the BusyBoxer desires a more lean and mean box. If used on a high-end server, the symbol could be defined and the wanted features would be fully enabled.

I just don't see how it is feasible to leave dozens of tiny utilities littered all over the root filesystem. BusyBox, in my opinion, would be a much more elegant solution to replacing the shell's non-built-in utility functions. Are there solid technical reasons why this has not been done?

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[big.ears]

I just don't see how it is feasible to leave dozens of tiny utilities littered all over the root filesystem.

With busybox, you just end up leaving dozens of symlinks littered all over the root filesystem. (bb looks at what the symlink it is called from is named and executes the proper command). From a file-system path search perspective, it is exactly the same thing as a bunch of little binaries. Plus, you get the advantage of easier maintenance, more functionality, better performance, easier drop-in replacement, and less chance of a developer turf-war (the maintainers of 'find' don't ever need to talk to the maintainers of 'grep', etc.).

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[Derleth]

Why can't Busybox be used for regular, 24/7 server use? It seems to provide all the necessary building block utilities one would expect in any Unix distribution; I'm up for it replacing /bin/* completely.

Do you really want all your eggs in one basket like that? Taking all of the essential system tools and replacing them with one single program is a good way to foster paranoia and early retirement in the sysadmin staff, and for what?

As long as it works well, fine. You've saved a little hard disk space and a little RAM. So what? Hard disks and RAM are cheap and getting cheaper. Splurge and give your sysadmins some full-size programs. It'll cost you less than your daily soda.

As soon as it fails, you are screwed. You no longer have a freaking shell. What do you intend to do now? Do you really want to have to use a rescue floppy every time a single program fails? It's a better risk to have multiple programs to spread the 'essential tasks' burden over than to load down one single program.

Finally, how often does bash crash? Ever? I'd be willing to bet it's never happened to you. It's never happened to me. Same with most, if not all, of the GNU Project's tools. And as long as bash stays up, you can usually work around the failure of almost anything else, because everything won't be failing at once. That's what you give up when you chase the BusyBox solution.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[p3d0]

I think your arguments about BusyBox "failing" are bogus because it's one program, not one process.

What exactly is the failure scenario you're afraid of here?

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[Istealmymusic]

I'm convinced. Separation of essential system routine maintence functions is necessary to ensure world class performance, as my boss would say.

So if it is, then why can't the separate-but-equal approach be applied to BusyBox, why haven't the developers chosen a less monolithic solution? Seriously, I fail to realize how one large file can be effectively different than dozens of small, efficiently-optimized binutils. Heck, if I wasn't so busy cybering I'd put in some #defines in the GNU binutils and fileutils packages to allow a less-saturated-fat version to be compiled, all directly from the same source.

On a similiar note, has anyone taken up the project of transcoding BusyBox into Unix or Linux assembly language? GCC can do a damn good job of optimizing out loops, but you can't beat hand-coded assembly in terms of space.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[Istealmymusic]

I suspect he was referring to security vulnerabilities--find one buffer overflow in ./busybox, and by calling the program with argv[0] set to appropriate subprogram, one could cause any symlinked bin utility to give it up. ...subconscious thoughts: ...kinda like the opposite sex...

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I just don't see how it is feasible to leave dozens of tiny utilities littered all over the root filesystem.

Busybox works two ways, either /bin/busybox "command" [optional flags] or you can symlink/hardlink it to [command] and run it like the ordinary command.

If you do it the first way, busybox "command" you'd have to type the extra letters all the time. You can alias it, but then you'd have to have a support issue with all the users unless you had universal aliases, and thats not optimal.

If you do it the second way, with the symlinks or hardlinks, you still have all the things in /bin, not much added elegance.

The code in busybox gets complicated. The added elegance in the file system becomes complications in the source code. Any updates to any of the "functions" as busybox calls them, requires an update to essentially all your userland utilities (as expressed in busybox). Lots of updates, lots of testing, because now any change to anytihng in busybox requires you to test everything, because a change in the ls "function" is in the same code that contains your mount command, and your cat, and your rm, etc., and now you need to test all of those as well.

Shared code can go into libraries. That's why libc is usually dynamically linked, shared code should be shared. You get your elegance with asmall executable with much of it's guts in shared libraries. Elegance here causes ugliness there. You pick your battles, you do things the way you want to. That said, busybox is opensource, and all of the gnu utilities are opensource as well. I don't think the busybox folks would mind patches from you or any others that share the view. I personally don't agree, my "elegance" is in smaller utilities with well defined functions, and I would not contribute.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[p3d0]

Thanks for the clarification, but I don't buy it. If BusyBox has a buffer overflow when argv[0] is set to, say, "vi", then that would be no more and no less damaging than if a regular system had a buffer overflow in vi.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[Anonymous Coward]

Code re-use !

Because busybox is one binary its easy to share code thats common to many utilities, have a look at busybox/libbb.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[Derleth]

What exactly is the failure scenario you're afraid of here?

Partially the security threat the other guy mentioned, partially simple buggy code: If all of your code is relying on the same routines to handle regular expressions, or argument processing, or anything else you can name, you'd better be pretty damned sure that code is bugfree. Everything is depending on it.

If, on the other hand, everything is split up (in the current scenario, in other words), a bug in grep's regexp handling isn't going to affect vi's regexp handling, and a bug in su's argument handling isn't going to be manifested in bash, too. Bugs are isolated and can be fixed without risk of hurting something else in that huge mess of a binary you would otherwise have.

Blackbox solutions in general look appealing until you realize Murphy's Law hasn't been repealed. Things will fail in obscure, abstruse ways, and it's always better to isolate failure as much as possible.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[Derleth]

If BusyBox has a buffer overflow when argv[0] is set to, say, "vi", then that would be no more and no less damaging than if a regular system had a buffer overflow in vi.

Ideally. But the real world is not ideal: Bugs may well be in shared code, and so would hit all BusyBoxApps equally. Then you are screwed.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[Derleth]

So if it is, then why can't the separate-but-equal approach be applied to BusyBox, why haven't the developers chosen a less monolithic solution?

As I've said before, if all of your eggs are in one basket, you'd better be damned sure that basket is near-perfect. I don't think any basket can be that perfect.

Code re-use is a good idea as long as the code is not buggy. If the code is buggy, everything is failing at once and you're left with a severely damaged system. I'd rather have a fighting chance.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[p3d0]

If all of your code is relying on the same routines to handle regular expressions, or argument processing, or anything else you can name, you'd better be pretty damned sure that code is bugfree. Everything is depending on it.

I think it's exactly the opposite. If they all share the same code, and that code works for one case, then it works for all of them.

Code is unlike almost anything else: the more you use it, the better it works.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[Derleth]

If they all share the same code, and that code works for one case, then it works for all of them.

`If the code works at all' is your unstated assumption, and that's what's torpedoing this whole plan. I don't place that much trust in any one piece of code.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[p3d0]

Let me re-iterate the portion of my post that you didn't quote:

Code is unlike almost anything else: the more you use it, the better it works.

Let me explain what I mean...

According to your logic, we should all stop using libraries like glibc and write our own routines for string manipulation, file manipulation, etc. for each program we write; and in so doing, the system of programs as a whole would become more robust because every bug would be confined to one program.

The fallacy here is that by re-implementing the same functionality repeatedly, the chances of having a bug increase at least as quickly as the number of implementations. In practice, it is likely to increase much more quickly, because each implementation is getting less exercise.

I would much prefer a single implementation of some given functionality shared among dozens of programs. It would be exercised much more heavily, making bugs less likely for all the programs.

Re:Use Busybox in all distributions

[dvdeug]

Why can't Busybox be used for regular, 24/7 server use?

Because it provides minimal versions of all tools that are sometimes much slower than the normal ones?

BSD's to the rescue

[dokebi]

He's bitching about a pentium? My firewall /e-mail server is a 486 w/ 8megs of RAM! From the FreeBSD handbook: 3.4. What do I need in order to run FreeBSD? You will need a 386 or better PC, with 5 MB or more of RAM and at least 60 MB of hard disk space. It can run with a low end MDA graphics card but to run X11R6, a VGA or better video card is needed.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[Istealmymusic]

I find this 386 minimum requirement quite interesting. For all intents and purposes, the IA-32 architecture has only slightly changed from generation-to-generation with extensions such as machine status registers (MSRs), or MMX and SSE support. However, the 386 is different from previous iterations in that it supported 32-bit protected mode, which all operating systems utilize today to their fullest capacity, though some ignore features such as code seperation via segmentation and paging (ironically, Palladium claims to provide these features but it is actually the 386 platform which does, right now.)

Anyone remember Windows for Workgroups 3.11? It could run in "enhanced" mode which was 32-bit pmode, or "standard" mode--you guessed it, 16-bit pmode. Since I assume 32- and 16-bit protected mode are similar in intent but varying in widths, does this mean FreeBSD can be slightly modified to run on a 16-bit 80286? What about Linux? (No, I don't want to run Minix.)

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[dokebi]

This question actually comes up every once in a while. The answer from the developers is that AT&T Unix (and therefore BSD) was always 32-bits. Thus the first PC port of BSD was on a 386 (in protected mode). It would be almost impossible to re-write the kernel to 16-bits, unless they were re-writing the OS from scratch.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[AndroidCat]

Umm, this isn't a flame, but why a 286? Three years ago, you could dumpster-dive for all the 486's you could cart away. (With memory and video even, since it was of no use in newer systems.) I hate to think on what the current "state-of-the-dumpster" is.

That said, Mark Williams used to have Coherent 286. Proprietary, but not bad for its day. The company is long gone, but someone might have a copy. I used Coherent 386 for a few years until MWC died and Linux stablized.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[Istealmymusic]

Thanks for your reply. Pretty much what I expected; I guess AWT had reasons for writing the 16-bit Minix OS from scratch.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[iggymanz]

Also, there was SCO Xenix for the 8088 and 8086 in 1983, and then SCO Xenix 286 in 1985.

http://stage.caldera.com/about/history.html

I used to run Coherent on my 286; I wonder if it would be legal to post the binaries since the company (Mark Williams Co.) is defunct?

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[AndroidCat]

Eulogy for Mark Williams An Atari ST version? Hmm, NAH! A book published with a Mini-version

Ah hell, "Coherent version 3.2 operating system uses the 286 protected mode." I gave my copy of 3.2 away long ago, otherwise it'd be free for the asking.

There's still a little traffic on comp.os.cohoerent: Interesting thread.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[AndroidCat]

*SPLORF*! I see that my advice hasn't changed one bit in 9 years: Me

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[HuguesT]

I have a 1989 286 from Goupil, defunct European PC manufacturer. I used to consult for them. The motherboard is one of their development one, with all the bugs taken out with soldered wires and hand cuts on the PCB, there are dozens of them! It looks like an engineering nightmare, the ultimate Kludge. It runs fine though, DOS obviously.

I would love to put Linux on that thing.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[AndroidCat]

I doubt that's going to happen. Now that I've refreshed my memory of the Bad Old Days, 286 protected mode is a different animal than 386 (and onwards) protected mode. For one thing, 286 protected mode uses 64k segments (UGH!), and the 286 registers are still 16 bit.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done in theory, but I will say that in practice, you don't want to try it. I'd say that your options are to start from somewhere else: Minix, Xenix, Coherent 3.2 if you can find a copy.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[Detritus]

AT&T Unix (V5, V6, V7) and BSD Unix (2.X) started out as 16-bit operating systems. They weren't ported to 32-bit systems (VAX, 370) until later. Even after they were running on 32-bit machines, there were still releases that supported 16-bit systems. I used to run AT&T System V Unix on an 80286 based computer.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[frozenray]

Ah, Coherent - "My first Unix", thanks for the links. I still have the 1056-page reference manual in my bookshelf, complete with the four 5 1/4" disks. The bill was $ 129.95, including international shipping. I ran it on my 2 MB IBM PC XT 286 - no X of course, it wasn't even included - with no problems.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[ChristTrekker]

Then you should be able to dumpster dive for Pentiums now, right? Let me know where I can find Mac hardware of similar vintage for that little and I might be interested.

Re:BSD's to the rescue

[ameoba]

Xenix (a Microsoft/SCO product) was a System III unix derivative that was used quite regularly on 16b hardware (I've seen it running on ancient (IE 8in floppy) Tandy Minicomputers and 286s, as well as running an entire 32 user lab (via multi-IO serial cards on Wyse Terminals) on a 386/25 w/ 16MB of RAM.

Aditionally, the PDP-11 was one of the first machines where a usuable Unix system ws worked on and it was 16b.

*Scratches_head* Um?

[arcadum]

133=mhz=300

Now that's a proof I want to see.

Bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to run a multi-user software development system on a PDP-11/23 (3.3 MHz) running V7 UNIX with 128KW (256KB) of RAM and a 30MB hard disk. It didn't support X, just 8 character mode terminals. It had most of the basic UNIX command line software that people still use today.

Re:Bloat

[base3]

I used to run a multi-user software development system on a PDP-11/23 . . .

And you could do it again.

What about Linux from Scracth?

[Wheaty18]

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org

Also includes a CowboyNeal load of documentation!

Try Slackware

[theBraindonor]

Here's what you need, straight from the source:

* 386 processor
* 16MB RAM
* 50 megabytes of hard disk space
* 3.5" floppy drive

By the way, that's not the requirements for an old version... That's for version 8.1 with the 2.4.18 kernel... Have fun.

Re:Try Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

* 386 processor - check! (1.4ghz)
* 16MB RAM - check (512mb)
* 50 megabytes of hard disk space - check (40gb)
* 3.5" floppy drive - doh!

oh well, cant win 'em all.

Re:Try Slackware

[BlueGecko]

The Slackware ISO is bootable. I literally just installed Slackware on Friday that way. I don't know why they list a floppy drive as a requirement, but if you have a CD, you can do it.

Until Slackware 9 comes out, why you'd want to is another issue, but . . . :)

Re:Try Slackware

[compwiz3688]

If you try to install it on a 386, you're gonna need a floppy to boot the installation. I doubt that any machine that old (pre-P2 era?) supports booting from a CD-ROM.

Re:Try Slackware

[Bishop]

Several original Pentiums boot fine from CD, as do some of the later 486s.

Re:Try Slackware

[whoda]

Did you even read the article? He looked into slackware and decided it didn't work.

Re:Ideological Cleansing

[Anonymous Coward]

IS: -1 off topic
SHOULD BE: +5 funny

Embedded Linux?

[PoorCoder]

Ain't embedded Linux the lightest of light already?

small size does come with a price

[updog]

"I was introduced to both uClibc and BusyBox, both of which I ended up using."

I spent several months with a small group of people putting together an embedded system, which used both uClibc and Busybox. While these are undoubtedly excellent pieces of open source software which are great for embedded systems, I find their use questionable for everyday desktop computing.
For example, many features you take for granted, say, with bash (such as compound commands, the full featured command execution environment) are not available with the smaller, simpler shells in Busybox.
The small size does come at a price... after all, the reason they are smaller is because along with the bloat, some of the less frequently used functionality has been removed.

Re:small size does come with a price

[Anonymous Coward]

Though busybox has limited functionality in some of its modules, you can always install the full package alongside busybox and then de-configure those particular particular modules inside busybox. A full bash is nice to have around, but other utilities such as mount or swapon can be provided by busybox. In this case the guy knows that a full-blown distro won't work, so it's either busybox/uclibx or nothing.

Re:small size does come with a price

[p3d0]

...the reason they are smaller is because along with the bloat, some of the less frequently used functionality has been removed.

What's the difference between bloat and less-frequently-used functionality?

Re:small size does come with a price

[Samrobb]

What's the difference between bloat and less-frequently-used functionality?

For any feature X...

• If you have ever used feature X before, it's "less-frequently-used functionality".
• If you've never used feature X before, and have half a brain, it's "rarely-used functionality".
• If you've never used feature X before, and lack the basic mental capacity to understand that it's in there because at least one person not only found a use for it but - in the case of Open Source software - also found the time to write the code for it... then it's "bloat".

what's wrong with Debian?

[twitter]

...a mint condition IBM ThinkPad 755C... On the resource side, I had 12 MB of memory and a 540-MB hard drive to work with...I planned to use the laptop for writing and for remote access to my more powerful desktop development system. Therefore, I needed a system with network support, a shell, a text editor like vi, CVS for versioning my documents, and SSH for secure remote access.

Huh? Those are really light requirements and with some additional RAM, that laptop could run X without a problem. Debinate it!

My 760LD has only 24M of RAM. It felt a little crammped with the 800 MB hard drive that came with it, but the only thing tedious about the installation of 2.2 potato was making the base install floppies. Once that was on, I could put the CD ROM in and zippy, no problem. The same har drive then worked with a much older Toshiba 468 with 8 or 16 MB or RAM. Yes, it does ssh. I got a bigger hard drive to feel less cramped and get more window managers. Using OLVWM I was able to make it display more than 256 colors, but it was stable with all the window managers I tried was stable with 256 colors. I probably boned up the ammount of RAM the card actually has, or missed some kind of shared memory thingy, shrug, it works.

For the lighter requirements this guy has, he should have loads of extra space and it should work just snappy. My 486 gateway runs a little ftp, ssh and most of the standard distro. It takes less than 150 MB of system files to do that, leaving 350 MB for temproary files.

Indeed, this fellows low expectations for his hardware should make the insalation much easier. I recenlty built a debian box on a 33MHz 486 with 8 or 12 MB RAM. It was painful, but you can just drop your hard disk into a nicer box and just put on the few things you want from a vanilla i386 binary install disk. If all you put on is i386, just put it all on in something with a little more RAM and pep, then drop it into your target. The kernel should adapt to it's new environment.

Apt-get upgrade was a little painful last time, with the new OpenSSH stuff but it did, finally, work. I had to manually dpkg the new packages and read the error messages and it took a day, grrrr! I should have left it alone, but I'm glad it's done.

Oh well, the man's effort is not wasted. His site is great for those who wish to really cut out the fluff and have a beautiful Spartan install. For the rest of you, I recomend the much easier Debian apt-get path.

Re:what's wrong with Debian?

[moosesocks]

Quite frankly, I'm suprised that either of you actually successfullly installed Linux on either of those machines.

The IBM 755,760 series was quite well known for its proprietary hardware. I owned a 755c and 760c (both were used and over 3 years old when I got them).

The 755 is a 486/66, had no CD-rom, no networking, etc without the need for a PC card (which required a proprietary driver)

The 760 is a Pentium/90 with an optional cdrom (which I didnt have), but still no networking.

I had no desire to use debian, as I had little linux experience a the time, and had no other choice but 3 cd-based distros. I eventually gave up.

But I digress. Most people don't realize that their needs for a server could probably be fufilled with a base install of debian or gentoo with all of the extra crap cut out which they don't need (does a fileserver really need http, ftp, and mail daemons running?)

Re:what's wrong with Debian?

[nels_tomlinson]

I'm running Woody on an old Dell Latitude 475XP: a 75MHz 486 with 12 MB RAM and a 3GB hard drive.

It is slow, but Blackbox or Icewm are practical to use on it. I can run Blackbox and an Xterm and one of Dillo or Abiword or about anything but OpenOffice or Mozilla or Emacs. Emacs is quite snappy without X, though.

Apt-get upgrade is slow; it takes it quite a while to thrash its way through building the package lists. But, it does the job, and I have a throughly up-to-date ancient machine.

If I could find some 72pin EDO SODIMMs to upgrade the memory, it would be a really adequate little box. It's only the disk thrashing that really slows it down. As long as it doesn't go into swap, it's surprisingly responsive.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

[SensitiveMale]

Or install linux on an AMD Hammer.

Same computing power.

Re:Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

[evilviper]

That reminds me... Some time ago I overheard a conversation about Linux packages.

Person 'A' asked person 'B' about the 'i386' notation on all the RPMs.
'B' said that it meant it was compiled on a 386.
'A' asked how someone could compile all those files on an old 386.
'B'managed to convince A that they have a cluster of hundreds of old 386's where they compile all the source code into RPMs.

I nearly fell over, laughing.

From the article...

[norweigiantroll]

"I refuse to bow to the conspiracy. When I came across a mint condition IBM ThinkPad 755C in a local garage sale, I realized that I had an opportunity to make a point. Hardware is only as old as the software that it runs."
What a coincidence, I just bought a 755CD from a garage sale for $20! I put Debian on it, and I generally use ratpoision and screen (as referenced by this article at freshmeat) for my "desktop"...

Two quick points:

[Alethes]

1) Using a light linux distro on a really fast machine just makes it seem that much faster. There's no need to try to find some old and slow machine to take advantage of a fast and light distro.

2) The versatility of Linux is really inspiring. We have everything from floppy distros, and game machines to Gnome, KDE and Lycoris all using variations of the same kernel. I, for one, think that's pretty cool.

Re:Two quick points:

[JasonAsbahr]

Hey, A,

Which game machines?

J

Re:Two quick points:

[CronoCloud]

Lets see, there's BSD on the Dreamcast, those Linux on the XBox fellows, and the official Playstation 2 Linux kit (http://playstation2-linux.com). Don't think anyone's ported anything to the Gamecube yet.

Re:Two quick points:

[JasonAsbahr]

Oh, duh, I see what you mean now. Thanks!

RG1000

[hoagieslapper]

We currently run linux on an Orinoco RG1000/RG1100 for our wireless network. With a little help from NSF mounts, everything works great. BTW IIRC an RG1000 is a 486 with 4MB of RAM.

Looking forward to the next installment

[kbielefe]

I have a 486SX/33 that I put Linux on a couple of weeks ago. I plan to eventually use this system for playing ogg files over my home stereo system. Now that tremor has been released I don't have to worry about not having a fpu.

I started with tomsrtbt on floppies, then installed it onto the hard drive. Once I had a working system I compiled a kernel with the sound card and network drivers and copied that over. Everything works great. There's something surreal about using a kernel that was just updated last week with hardware that hasn't been sold in almost 10 years.

I'm having trouble statically linking sshd, so I'm looking forward to the next installment. Shouldn't be too hard to set up dynamic libraries, but advice from someone who has done it already always helps.

Re:Looking forward to the next installment

[zcat_NZ]

You won't be able to play regular ogg's on a 33MHz machine, even if it had an FPU. You could possibly play them on a 486 DX4-100 with nothing else running, and you can easily do it on a P90.. I've played mp3's on a DX2-66 before; even with a custom kernel and booting directly into a bash shell you still can't play them at 44KHz stereo. OTOH if you're playing low-bitrate (16-32 kbps) ogg's (perhaps for recorded speech or telephone hold music) that would probably work..

Re:Looking forward to the next installment

[kbielefe]

You're probably right, but that won't keep me from trying. I've seen standalone MP3 players with processors around 10 MHz. Of course, those have separate mpeg decoder chips. 44.1 kHz stereo is 374 clock cycles per sample at 33 MHz. I'd say that brings it in the realm of possibility for an experienced C and assembly coder, especially with nothing else running. If worse comes to worse, I can do the decoding on another machine on my LAN and just stream the raw PCM over.

On the bright side, maybe extremely poor audio quality will convince my wife to let me spend some money on the hardware I really want. A new mini-itx system with dvd recorder for the all-in-one dvd player/ogg player/cd player/pvr/dvd recorder system I have in mind. Ah, I can only dream right now.

Re:Looking forward to the next installment

[DJPenguin]

*kerrrrak* - simpsons "whip cracking" sound...

OT: LFS

[Bios_Hakr]

LFS was a great tool for me. Before LFS, I didn't really understand how to customize my bash prompt, controll where software was installed to, edit runlevel and startup scripts, or a thousand other things that any Linux user SHOULD be able to do.

But, alas, what killed it for me was the complexity of the modern desktop. KDE was easy to compile and install, but a thousand neat little features of KDE (like the audio cd to mp3 interface) never worked right. Any time I saw something cool, I needed to go back and recompile some new flag into some library...and then recompile everything thay used that lib. It was a major PITA.

LFS should be everyone's first distro. The ammount of knowledge you gain from struggling with something as simple as getting 'ls' to output in colors will help tremendously in the rest of your linux journey. That being said, the LFS community probably isn't up to the task of supporting hundreds (thousands) of newbies. Especially if they bombard the IRC channels with even a tenth of the questions I laid on those guys.

LFS is awesome for a learning tool, and I want to thank the LFS community for their project/product.

Re:OT: LFS

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

I think slackware teaches you just as well, If you want to learn.
man 1 bash should be required reading, as should vimtutor.
Gentoo is also nice for learning, but I definitly agree with you about nothing working until you go and recompile 1000 libs. Thats why I prefer debian, Most things work by default, and anything that dosnt is an apt-get or two away.
Debians menu system is great to, All packages install a menu file entry, then window manager menu's are dynamicly created based on that.
For example, if you have blackbox and kde installed, when you startx the kde and blackbox menu files are created based on a database of installed apps.

For more info, See apt-cache show menu

And Un /. 'able

[bstadil]

Have you noticed that the server it sits on is unfazed by the onslaught from /. ?

hate to sound elitist

[Raven42rac]

but arent most distros pretty much lightweight in the first place, its is mostly during the install that you can choose whether or not to install bloat

LiGNuX

[Arandir]

Now I can run this operating system without one byte of GNU software. But I'll still have to call it GNU/Linux. That's progress!

Re:LiGNuX

[serial frame]

I'm seriously doubting that the Free Software Foundation lay any claim to uClibc or Busybox. So, sir, you are wrong in your troll.

Re:LiGNuX

[Arandir]

Of course the FSF has no claims to these packages! Sometimes I think Slashdot readers check their sense of humour at the door.

Re:LiGNuX

[serial frame]

Conversely, you would be surprised at how many people would have taken the great-grandparent post as fact if left unmoderated. The joke is only so funny up to a point.

Not that I would be surprised or anything to see RMS advocating the usage of the GNU/ prefix when referring to the firmware distributed with the newest batch of smart self-pleasure toys. Now, that's progress.

Re:LiGNuX

[Arandir]

Conversely, you would be surprised at how many people would have taken the great-grandparent post as fact if left unmoderated.

Think of it as evolution in action...

The writer went way too far. The EASY WAY IS:

[crazyphilman]

Hey, all, just to put this in context, I've been collecting some very old Itronix Mil-Spec laptops recently (one survived being thrown full-strength by me, a 285 pound ex-marine, from seven feet onto worn-out carpet over plywood, and booted up no problem) because I have a fetish for such things. Let's just say I have a thing for durability. The only problem is, the laptops have a "full environmental seal" which means no cd-rom, no internal floppy, no usb ports, etc. They only have a parallel and serial port, a phone jack, and a PCMCIA port protected with a cast aluminum door and a gasket. My weaker ones have eight MB of ram each and are only 486DX2-50's, with a 260MB HDD. My three stronger ones are Pentium 133's with 32MB of ram each, and about a 1.3 GB disk, with monochrome LCDs. Only one has color, but that one's just a 640x480 LCD. I wanted to run Linux, and not some quirky, doofy ancient Linux either. Here's how I got it to work.

Step 1. I have an external floppy that connects to the PCMCIA slot, and a parallel port zipdrive. So, I downloaded Zipslack (available on the Slackware website) and the companion, fourmeg.zip, which creates a swap file. Zipslack is interesting because it creates a UMSDOS slackware installation on a zipdisk (just unzip it to the zipdisk). This can then be booted from the zipslack boot floppy (boot from the boot floppy, then direct root at /dev/sda4, i.e. the zipdisk). Zipslack booted with only minor difficulties -- I had to tweak a couple of BIOS settings, that's all.

2. Once in Zipslack, I had to set up the Itronix's hard disks for Linux. So, first, I fdisked, and set up most of each disk as a type 83 Linux partition, and the rest as a type 82 Linux swap. I probably gave too much swap; I took a guess for the "big" ones and made it like 88 cylinders; I think it turned out to be better than 128MB (I made it a LOT smaller on my little ones). Next, I formatted the disk: I ran the command:

"mke2fs -L armadillo -c -c -j /dev/hda1"

This surprised me a little, pleasantly: I knew the two "-c" params would cause it to overwrite the disk with nulls, but it did it FOUR TIMES, which is pretty damn thorough. Once that finished up (it took at least an hour on my old machines) I mounted the disk as type "ext3" on /mnt/hd.

3. Now, I copied my entire root directory onto the mount point, leaving out the loadlin stuff and files that were obviously DOS related (like the DOS mount directory). I copied each directory using (for example) "cp -a /bin /mnt/hd/bin". Of course, I didn't copy /mnt or /proc. For those, I just mkdir'ed them in the new directory. Once I was satisfied that the entire zipslack system was copied over to the new partition, I edited /mnt/hd/etc/fstab and set up the "/" partition as /dev/hda1 (and set up swap as well, although I wasn't sure I had to do that). Then, I rebooted using the boot disk.

4. This time, I pointed the root directory at /dev/hda1. I booted into my hard drive's Linux, and ran liloconfig to set up automatic booting with LILO. I ran it in expert mode, and set up only one entry, i.e. that for Linux. Then I set it up to automatically boot into that entry with no delay.

The result is that my little Linux machines all work perfectly!

On my "big" ones, I put a bunch more stuff in. I put in the development disk set, plus x, xap, most of n, and this coming week I'm adding kde and gnome. On my "little" ones, I've only got 260MB of space, so I'm going to stick with text-mode. I'm toying with the idea of using emacs as an environment for those, IF the e set will fit on 'em of course.

The most expensive of these laptops was 150.00. The cheapest was 25.00. Zipslack was free. Now, is that a great deal or what? Especially considering they're like indestructible little armadillo monsters, right?

Oh, by the way: I'm using Zipslack 8.1 and I'll probably upgrade to 9.0 when it comes out. Gotta love Slackware! Bob RULES!

BTW: my grammar isn't so hot today. It's the Marine Corps Birthday (10 Nov) and the "Marine Corps Drink" is the Rum and Coke, so cut me some slack there (ha! get it? SLACK! I slay me)... ;P

Re:The writer went way too far. The EASY WAY IS:

[zogger]

--this is cool beans man, thanks for your post, and good on you with the armored laptops, I 'll have to keep me peepers open for one, I like the idea.

Re:The writer went way too far. The EASY WAY IS:

[alfaiomega]

Where can I buy such laptops like yours? A CD changer in my car just died and I'm planning to install a laptop jukebox instead. Your armored laptops sounds perfect for such a thing, as I was concerned about strong vibrations in my car which could kill sensitive laptop very quickly.

Re:The writer went way too far. The EASY WAY IS:

[Zebbers]

along your lines
i bought a panasonic toughbook cf25
p150, 48mb(upgraded to 80), 2gig harddrive for 150$

I run slack8.l *FULL* unmodified install ;) I installed over a parport cdr drive. I have it run with kde. Now...granted, it IS slow...but Im never really moving back and forth between windows...usually only word processing or coding. And I don't use it that much...I'll prolly look to trim it all down a little...Hmmmm, maybe tonight.
Maybe tonight.

Re:The writer went way too far. The EASY WAY IS:

[Zebbers]

by the way..the reason the slowness matters little...is Ive got hibernation working. so zero booting. I just turn it on...wait a few and bam its back where I left, open windows and all. A clean reboot takes a piece of time..specially waiting for kde to load.

Re:The writer went way too far. The EASY WAY IS:

[maudite615]

http://www.hitechcafe.com look under systems 39$ for the 486-50 model (they have around 1000) in stock maudite

Re:The writer went way too far. The EASY WAY IS:

[crazyphilman]

I've got three Itronix XC-6250s and three Panasonic CF-25's... One of my CF-25s is only a Pentium 100, which is going to get Slackware... But the other two were Pentium 167Mhz's with maxed out ram (I haven't messed with them in a while, but I think I've put 96MB in 'em). The two 167's are actually running Red Hat 7.3, KDE 3.0, and the liquid mod!!! They work great, they're slightly sluggish, but I haven't had any trouble.

The Panasonics are a little nicer than the Itronix (they have an internal swappable CD-Rom/Floppy, more PCMCIA ports, etc) but they don't have as durable an environmental seal. I use them more as my "home" machines, with the Itronix ones being my "road" boxen. The Panasonics ROCK, don't they? Gotta love 'em. SO cool.

Re:The writer went way too far. The EASY WAY IS:

[crazyphilman]

I bought all my laptops on Ebay. I got four Itronix XC-6000s for 25.00 each, and three XC-6250s for 50.00, 107.00, and 150.00 respectively, if I remember. I also bought three Panasonic CF-25's for about the same price range, although I paid almost 300 for one of them before I realized I could get the same thing for cheaper. Hindsight is 20/20! ;)

Basically, do an Ebay search for "Itronix" or for "Panasonic Toughbook" and you'll see TONS of Mil-spec laptops for sale. Most don't go much higher than 150.00.

Here's some model info:

Itronix XC-6000: This is a 486 DX2-50 with 8MB of RAM, and a 260MB hard drive. On this you can run a pretty useful Slackware text-mode install, although if you put in all the Emacs stuff you might be a little low on hard disk space. Give yourself a BIG swap partition!

Itronix XC-6250: This is a Pentium, usually either 133Mhz or 200Mhz, usually with a monochrome 640x480 screen but you sometimes luck out and find one with the larger 800x600 screen. The monochrome is pretty good, and the backlight looks cool. If you can find one with the color touchscreen, those are really nice! It's very bright and clear. Most of the color ones I've seen were 640x480.

Panasonic CF-25: These come in Pentium 100, Pentium 150, and Pentium 167 models. These are really nice. If the Itronix is a Ford F-350 with duallies and a four wheel drive, then the Panasonic is a nice Range Rover with A/C and leather seats, sorta. Both will take you off road with no sweat, but the F-350 "wins" a collision between the two. ;)

Having said that, the Panasonic CF-25 is very nice. Make sure you get the swappable internal CD-Rom AND the internal floppy, AND the power supply. If you get all three, the auction is worth doing. Also, look at the picture and note the screen size. Some models come with a smaller screen, some with a full size screen. If this matters to you, go for the larger one; I thought the smaller one was kinda cute.

NOTE: The Panasonic 100Mhz model will NOT BOOT FROM THE CD-ROM, and DOES NOT HAVE AN INTERNAL BIOS UPDATE PROGRAM!!! Which was a nasty surprise for me. You can download the software from Panasonic, but you'll have to install Windows 95 or 98 on the laptop to update your BIOS!!! All of the 167Mhz models have an internal BIOS update feature, and let you boot from the CD-Rom (meaning installing Linux is a piece of cake). Just an FYI.

Notes on resetting laptops: the Itronix reset when you hold down both mouse buttons for about fifteen seconds. Release them when the laptop shuts down and it boots up again, completely reset. Then you can usually go into the BIOS utility. The older ones also have a reset button that's very, very tiny near the PCMCIA release button. The Panasonics have a tiny, tiny recessed reset button near the place where the power cord plugs in. You can push it with a paperclip.

Hope this helps... Check 'em out. You can get these things for peanuts, man, it's totally cool. Think about it: for under fifteen hundred bucks (counting virtually EVERYTHING I bought to go with my laptops) I have like, TEN laptops instead of only one. Can't complain about that -- I figure, if I'm on the road and someone rips me off, it's like, "Oh, well; I'll draw another one from the armory".

There more redundancy than just that

[Anonymous Coward]

The link for the story is actually a link to a universal server farm (www-106.ibm.com) that IBM runs - and I'm not quite familiar with that. However, the main IBM sites (www-[1-4].ibm.com) are run in IBM Service Delivery Centers and behind each of those multiple ip addresses, you would see a network dispatcher load balancing among 4 or 5 servers in a WTE (Web Traffic Express) cluster (it serves as a reverse proxy). The origin server that the proxy hands off the request to is also clustered and load balanced by yet another network dispatcher machine.

There is some serious redundancy there. If IBM websites go down, its not the machines / servers that are failing but the people behind them....

uhh wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

just because a distribution takes up 10 megs does not mean its lightweight.

what would you say to a distro that took 10 meg, then made a 100 meg ram disk and extracted the root to that and started running X?

ignorance is bliss isn't it?

Re:uhh wrong

[chrj]

what would you say to a distro that took 10 meg, then made a 100 meg ram disk and extracted the root to that and started running X?

Debian doesn't do that. Unless you choose to install X, you don't get any X libs or whatsoever.

right direction

[Connie_Lingus]

Well now that IBM is on the project, can we expect a developerWorks posting on getting it to run on my VIC 20 and TRS-80?? You know, the one with the cassette drive...

Didn't Minix have a C compiler on a floppy?

[iamacat]

And just think about just how many DOS/Win3.1 stuff you could fit in 12MB RAM/540MB HD. Actually, I was running a regular Linux 1.x system with X on a machine like this a while ago and still kept a DOS partition.

I don't think this qualifies as a "feather weight" distributon. At least not in the same sense as the smallest ELF executable. Try a full featured UNIX system on a Palm, including editor, compiler and /usr/games, then it would be worth an article.

FreeBSD may be an option

[Billly Gates]

FreeBSD works great with minimal hardware due to the absensce of bloatware on most modern linux distro's. The Bsd daemons like inet are much less resource intensive then their Linux counterparts. By default FreeBSD only has minimal daemons running.

Gentoo may be another option due to its liteness upon default install. Everything and I mean everything must be configured and installed via "emerge x". This is also the downside. IF you have a slow 386 and a 28. modem for an internet connection you can expect s several day installation.

NetBSD seems popular with many users with old machines like ancient macs. It may be more minimalist but I have never used it. Perhaps someone who has could care to comment. I like FreeBSD because of the excellent book that comes with the box set which will be helpfull since you will not have any of the gui point and click utilities like anaconda and yast2 to setup your 386.

I like Linux myself because I am use to the SYSV init. I do not wish to start a flameware but FreeBSD is great for minimal installs and come with the best console documentation. It has its uses and if your use standard free software like sambe or apache, then a *BSD variant or Linux one wont matter.

Palm Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

If there are designers out there who can put Linux and other OSs on ancient computers, why haven't there been ports to PDAs yet? Nearly all of the PDAs within the past year come with at least 12mb of memory standard, and take 128 or 256mb memory sticks. With a little more prying, I would think that traditionally desktop OSs could be run on PDAs. What's stopping that from happening?

Re:Palm Ports

[WebMasterJoe]

There is a flavor of linux that runs on the iPaq, the name of the distro is Familiar. There is also a GUI for it, named Opie. I had both of these on mine, but the difficulty I had syncing it with either my Win2K at work or my Linux box at home was disappointing. And it was slow. And I had a lot of freeze-ups (don't know whether to blame Opie or Familiar for that though).

As a side note, installing Linux on an x86-based machine is much different than installing it on a PDA, which uses a variety of different chips. The memory sticks don't have the same speed as conventional memory, too. And then there's the fact that people use PDA's differently than handhelds - putting a desktop OS on a handheld makes the handheld harder to use. Not that that argument has stopped people from installing Linux on a Dreamcast...

Mac OS Linux - the Weight Watchers of Distros

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming from the famous Apple comapany.

Features:

1) Quick GUI
2) Fast Software Updates
3) Responsive App Times

Available Spring 2020.

the third way

[Anonymous Coward]

If you use a busybox shell then you can make the commands built into the shell

It doenst need a symlink or hardlink.

Re:the third way

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

If you use a busybox shell then you can make the commands built into the shell

Interesting. I haven't heard of this (my work is a pretty big solaris shop, so I don't use busybox much). I don't see this much different than having aliases in /etc/profile though, check the $0 of your shell, and if it supports aliases,
alias ls='busybox ls'
alias mount='busybox mount'

and so on, and doesn't force a shell choice on you.

zsh has very cool configurable shell completion. You could configure it to give you all the options for any given command. You could program this for busybox, have it give you the possibilities "ls, dd" and so on once you type busybox.

This doesn't solve the "everything in one binary so if I make one change someplace I essentially have to test 10 or so utilities" problem tho, but I think you were just mentioning the shell thing, not implying it was a complete solution.

As an aside, ksh93 has many more builtins than other shells, and has them loaded as shared libs. yeah you can do this with basha as well, but the defaut bash doens't have dd as a buoltin, ksh93 does. In fact this is one of the reasons ksh93 isn't in cygwin yet; ksh93 is more of an environment than a shell, with many utilities stuck in it.. the cygwin folks don't want to add that on top of other tools.

Debian

[pkplex]

Ive had Debian running as a gateway on a 386 with 4mb of ram.. ( I installed it using another computer though ). It was swapping all the time, added another 4mb of ram and it was fine. So, in conclusion; Use Debian :)

Re:Debian

[dsfd]

I did exactly the same installation but just for fun. I never upgraded the RAM so the system works terribly slow... but runs and it is nice to see Debian on it. It is a 386 SX 16.

http://flame.dnsart.com/

[SHEENmaster]

My server is only a 1ghz box w/ 2 cd burners, 1 dvd-rom, two floppies, two ethernet (one for cable one for lan), video capture and a 3d accelerator to top it off.

It is acting as a proxy server to let me post this comment and should be acting as a fully functional NAT by the end of the night.

Why do some people think that they need a powerfull server? It's not like they have nethack lan parties, oh wait........

Re:http://flame.dnsart.com/

[DJPenguin]

Two floppies? Wow... you can do on-the-fly floppy copying!

Or maybe you could stripe files across two floppies for that little bit extra performance! ...why?

Re:http://flame.dnsart.com/

[sg_oneill]

Warezing games of course! Although one still needs a util that can crack the boobytrap sectors on the floppy..... Oh wait? What years this?

"Minimal" system my arse!

[zcat_NZ]

I'm highly amused by some of the comments in this thread; from my own perspective anything better than a P100 w 32M ram is a perfectly acceptable system. My main machine right now is a P166 with 64M and as well as using it for browsing, programming, etc it provides NAT, DNS, dhcp, apache.. I'm planning to upgrade sometime (probably to a P233, I had one last year but it died :( ). I'm in no hurry; this machine does everything I need for now.

My first linux machine was a 386 with 4M ram. I had to upgrade to 8M fairly quickly because it would totally thrash when I tried to compile the kernel (or almost anything else bigger than hello.c) and I couldn't run X at all until I got a 486..

Kids these days.. bah!!

I'll bookmark the link though; I have a spare P100 with 8M on it that I'd like to turn into a dedicated mp3/ogg player.

Re:"Minimal" system my arse!

[Anonymous Coward]

And how much do you use, say povray?

the inverse is a good idea.

[twitter]

Imagine how fast that would be !!!

Well, just pull up a console, kill all your services and boggie. It does make a difference. Your nasty math problems will be able to suck up all your memory and little will interrupt. You can go down from there if you wish. Boot up with grub to ye new Spartan kernel, and define a run level that's just like you want it and kick some ass. Spend a few more bucks to set up as many machines as you have projects. SSH into it to start your problem and then get your answer.

Pitty all OS are not so easy to configure. You want more, you got it. You want less, OK. You want to throw everything you got at one thing, go for it. A box that you have to leave your chair to mess with is a pain, and should be fixed with a new OS.

uClibc is not going to replace glibc

[KidSock]

I see a lot of positive comments about uClibc and it may work great for you but uClibc has a few sticky points. There are current issues with scanf, floating point format strings with printf, strcol, i18n support (e.g. iconv), some networking stuff, no threads, etc. This is great if you're building little commandline utilities like busybox but don't expect to be able to run something like a Java VM.

Re:uClibc is not going to replace glibc

[hughk]

Horses for courses...

Well I guess someone will want to do a small footprint Java VM someday with uClibc. I understand the threads thing is now in the latest release though. Perhaps the rest will appear as well.

Glibc is wonderful, but its footprint is going to stamp my PDA into the ground. There is a definite need for a Glibc-, where the real issue is low footprint rather than performance and uClibc is one such solution.

Re:uClibc is not going to replace glibc

[osu-neko]

uClibc is in a state now were it can replace glibc for most programs. It compiles a lot more than just busybox. My 486 laptop runs Linux From Scratch with uClibc as its only libc. Everything in the Linux From Scratch book compiled just fine, as did add-ons like OpenSSL/OpenSSH, joe, nasm, etc. I'd install X if my laptop's HD wasn't a mere 200 MB, part of which is partitioned for another OS...

Check the website for a list of known good programs. It runs a *lot* more than busybox. Thinks that *don't* work under uClibc seem to be the exception these days -- and usually they're bloatware you wouldn't want to run on a minimal system anyway (can you imagine a Java VM on a 40 MHz 486? Yikes...)

My linux floppy howto

[clasher]

Always looking for an excuse to post my personal HOWTO for using uClibc & busybox to make a single floppy linux disk. I also have a few example floppy images here. My firewall is running from a linux floppy right now.

What other free C libs are out there?

[duffbeer703]

We may need new C library implementations, especially if the GNU lunatics ever decide to change future versions of glibc to GPL licensing rather than LGPL.

You may laugh at this as a crazy notion, or even a troll. But looking at the near-hysterical rants from the head of the GNU project regarding the whole "GNU/Linux" issue, I'd say that it is a definate possibility.

this is it!

[sickmtbnutcase]

I knew i needed that dual 1GHz PIII box for something! Now i know how to set it up!

Re:*Scratches_head* Um?

[Anonymous Coward]

133+133=300
a=a
a^2=a^2
a^2-a^2=a^2-a^2
(a+a)( a-a)=a(a-a)
(a+a)=a
2a=a
2=1
133+133=300

You get the point, right?

Thank dog

[Anonymous Coward]

I did shoehorn Win98 onto a 486/66 for my burglar alarm, but it's not a pretty sight.

At least you didn't longhorn it on. Har.

BTW, there is a #uclibc channel

[andersen]

Just in case people are not aware, in addition to the BusyBox and uClibc websites, there is also a #uclibc channel on irc.openprojects.net (irc.freenode.net). I often show up there, and as time permits, I try and help people with their BusyBox and uClibc problems. It makes a nice resource, and helps take the load off of my Inbox a little bit.

Also, I'd like to stress that we do have mailing lists, and people are encouraged to use them. I get _way_ too much email to answer it all. It bugs me when I get "I was too busy to check the mailing list or the FAQ, and just thought I'd ask you directly" type emails. Sorry, but I just have to ignore such people. Use the mailing lists. Try to catch me on irc if you can. But please don't sent me personal email unless you are also sending donations... :-)

The TRUE lightest of the light

[xenofalcon]

You can drool all you want over these things, but I'm waiting for a version of Linux that doesn't even need a CPU, let alone a computer.

Re:The TRUE lightest of the light

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm waiting for a version of Linux that doesn't even need a CPU, let alone a computer.

Sounds like you want Donald Knuth's LiMIX distribution. True, you have to do all the source package builds using pencil and a (loooooooooooooooooooooooooong) piece of paper, but no computer required, and the suspend/resume function works quite well!

Well, as long as you don't light a match near the 'computer'..

Re:FreeBSD may be an option

[Alpha_Nerd]

I believe Gentoo requires 64mb of ram... Imagine compiling everything with 16mb of ram lol!

my litepc experience

[fliptout]

I decided to downgrade my pentium 233 thinkpad from windows 2000 to windows ME with litepc installed since my laptop has been too slow lately. So i buy litepc, installed windows me, and proceeded to strip it down as much as possible. I think 98lite is a cool product. HOWEVER, i decided i REALLY despise 98/ME. i mean, those are some really shitty os's. so, i ended up reinstalling windows 2000 and tweaking it as much as possible. oh, running office 97 and eudora instead of office 2k/xp helps a lot too...

Re:my litepc experience

[Anonymous Coward]

oh, running office 97 and eudora instead of office 2k/xp helps a lot too...

Not running Office cures you for good.

Small single-task operating systems.

[os2fan]

Until recently, my main machine was a 486/66 with 20 meg of ram. On this, I ran some 20 operating systems.

One of these was a version of OS/2, complete with gui, 4os2 and cdburner, that lived in 10 megabytes.

The installation was not hard - sysintx and rar did it.

So I could use the main version of OS/2 without having to worry about chewing up memory for the cd-burner. OS/2 breaks the 504 barrier for HPFS partitions. So does Linux, and Windows NT, the former installed but never booted.

OS/2 has a considerably smaller footprint, given that a lot of it can be installed on another drive.

The idea of having a small footprint is not bad at all. You can make a boot cd that runs the desired OS off the cdrom and ramdisk. This is how eComStation installs.

In fact, the notion of one OS for all tasks is quite unecconomical, especially if the machine is to run unattended, or in a specific activity.

You can burn cdroms off in 20 mb of ram. There are utilities that unload dlls to expediate the process.. (eg allocmem)

.

Small Linux Distribution

[benjamindees]

A little googling came across Small Linux. It looks like it includes a few pre-compiled programs and TinyX as well.

You don't need a floppy drive.

[1%warren]

8.1 was notrious for requiring 5 floppies to install - I beleve it's addressed somewhat in the "Slackware FAQ" or the "Slackware HOWTO" but I put up a page that explains how it's done without floppies..

Basically you start the install from a DOS partition (I used FreeDOS sucsessfully) using loadlin, a Slackware kernel, & the initrd.img from the isolinux dir - you can turn the DOS partition into a Linux swap (or whatever) partition after you've booted the install.

Re:I'll drink to that

[Bastian]

I switched from Mandrake to Gentoo last summer, and although I won't make any statements as to how much of a difference having all the software on my computer optimized for my architecture (PIII) made, I will say that I have still noticed a speed difference. For the most part, I attribute that to the fact that basically anything that is running on my system is something I put there, meaning I don't have any unused krap on my machine, nor did I have to spend a lot of time removing that krap to get rid of it. (Instead, I spent the time watching movies while Portage did its thing - sounds more fun to me ;-)

I now go from BIOS to X in about a quarter the time it took to get my computer booted when I was using Mandrake 8.1.

Great article is just the start

[Call Me Black Cloud]

This first in the series is titled "Leverage older hardware and break the hardware/software upgrade cycle"

Future installments in the "breaking the cycle" series include:

Maintaining your 1932 Pierce Arrow

Connecting cable to your Philco Predicta

Making ice last through the summer

Rolling your own condoms

Re:FreeBSD may be an option

[whiteranger99x]

If you're looking for something smaller than FreeBSD, maybe PicoBSD might be a better bet.

It's based on FreeBSD 3.0-Current and needs only a 386SX, 8MB RAM and boots off a floppy (HDD optional ;)

Re:RTFA

[Bastian]

He ruled out slackware because it was a tight fit for the amount of RAM the computer had, ~12mb.

Having run Slackware on a 486dx/33 with 8mb of RAM and set it up as a fileserver, I believe him. Even with the most bare-minimum shrinky-dink install Slack offers, it still took a lot of time with a meat cleaver to get the system pared down enough that I could do much of anything without forcing the system to swap.

Had I known about uClibc at the time, I would have used it - I don't know how much space it saves, but if the difference is signifigant, I think it might easily improve performance on older machines despite the sacrifice in speed of the code. The less RAM you have to devote to libc, the less the computer is going to have to swap.

What would be really cool

[1%warren]

Is to cross this with MuLinux

which is already set up to run on old hardware, has some really great configuration tools, but really outdated software (2.0.x kernel, libc5, X 3.3.1), such that I shuddered when connecting it to the internet.

My firewall

[einhverfr]

120 MHz K5, 32 MB RAM, 3 GB Hard Drive. OK, I regret using such a large hard drive for this...

The real impressive thing isn't the low hardware, it is the fact that I run TinyDNS as my external DNS server on it, use SSH for remote access (only from the internal network), handle log-file parsing and management, on the box (in the middle of the night), and many other tasks. In fact, I could do all this on a 80486, but the RAM is the big commodity with all these things. But additional performance tuning will help. Additionally it is running FreeS/WAN though we will eventually be setting up a virtual router behind the NAT for handling GRE-tunneled IPSEC between offices ;)

In fact the thing is so highly automated I sometimes forget that it is in the corner (reports of activity are happily directed to me every morning and I don't have to access the box myself).

Had almost 90 days uptime when I had to replace the CPU fan. Now I am thinking about drop-in redundency ;)

Re:My firewall

[jshare]

*sigh*

You speak of common things.

Re:right direction... slowly.

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, the one with the cassette drive...

Jeez. Those things are slow for sure, but can you imagine what happens when you need to use swap???

Re:FreeBSD may be an option

[be-fan]

Um, gentoo (1.4 anyway) defaults to gcc 3.2. On my 2GHz P4 with 640MB of RAM, it's already a several day installation (KDE takes a full 8 hours). I really don't want to imagine it on a P133 much less a 386 :)

Cobalt Cube? Shee. Everex 486-33!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kids these days. I ran Netware 2.15 on a 33mhz 486 with 16 megs RAM. 512meg ESDI drive, three Token Ring NICs, served files for over 100 people. And we liked it. We _loved_ it. We were boot-from-floppy DOS lubbers running WordPerfect on 12" greenscreens, and we were _thankful_.

Better than a P100 with 32M RAM??

[Second_Derivative]

Kids these days. Until quite recently I was hosting several PHP based websites off a P75 with 24MB RAM and it was actually working remarkably well. Ok then some tit went and installed vBulletin so I had to upgrade but I personally blame the fact that vBulletin is written like crap rather than the server itself - 111 days uptime it got: went up when I built it, the next time it went down is when I had to decommission it.

ever heard about...

[fake666]

ROCK Linux?

ROCK Linux is a distribution-build-kit, with which you can easily create targets, for example a "small" target. Everything is compiled from source, optimized to your wish (gcc{2,3}, glibc{2.2.5,2.3.1},dietlibc...) once you start a build.

The download of the source tar.bz2/gz's is done by a script, too.

We are currently working on integrating uClibc, and already use dietlibc for the "bootdisk"/ "rescue system" target.

maybe worth a look ;)

FAKE

Not Impressed

[RAMMS EIN]

Sorry, I'm not impressed by this. 12 MB? I think I can run a vanilla Linux distro on that. I have and old IMB PS/ValuePoint 425SX/S (25 MHz, no FPU, 4 MB RAM that somehow refuses to be upgraded...anybody know why?) here that I wanted ti run Linux on. I couldn't get any Linux install floppy to boot and work on it, not even the ones that were advertised as working with 4MB core. I suppose this is due to IBM eating up 384 KB of memory (shadow ROM or something). Anyway, I made my own bootdisk with a 2.4.19 kernel with networking support, module for my NIC, and an uncompressed filesystem with busybox, fdisk, ip, mke2fs, insmod, mkswap and swapon, all statically linked to dietlibc. It worked great on my machine, allowed me to partition the hard drive, create and mount the swap partition, make and mount an ext2 file system, and install the files necessary for booting. I'm currently working on a uClibc-based system with picogui. It's almost finished and will be available from my website once it is. It could take some time, though, cause I'm overloaded with work these days.

---
Goto, n.:
A programming tool that exists to allow structured programmers
to complain about unstructured programmers.
-- Ray Simard

Re:Not Impressed

[newdaemon]

I had Small Linux working on this same laptop. It worked fine. Check out the 4mb Laptop HOWTO at the Linux documentation project for details. The install is pretty painless.

Re:FreeBSD may be an option

[eMago]

I'm using both FreeBSD and NetBSD on my machines. But as you guessed, FreeBSD needs more ressources than NetBSD. While NetBSD 1.5 runs fine on my 486SX33 /w 8MB RAM (7.8 MB are usable), FreeBSD needs 12MB or more at least for installation. NetBSD even installs with 4MB RAM. I even tried to install it with 3.8 MB RAM usable but that was not possible (fdisk ran out of memory).

As a matter of fact I'm using FreeBSD on my FASTEST machine - mainly because building the ports needs a lot CPU power - and NetBSD on my slowest (it's a good "SpartaniX").
All the other machines (4) in between are Linux, mostly Debian. A 486/DX66, now with 16MB RAM, is running Slackware 8 with X on top.
But it's not true - as stated in the article - that the lastest Slackware needs 12MB RAM. It installed fine with 8 MB RAM.

However, for the slowest of the slow I would suggest NetBSD - it's the least demanding, while I don't think FreeBSD is really great for minimal installs. Compare the defaults. NetBSD has less than half of the programs in [/usr/s]bin compared to FreeBSD. And even less than OpenBSD:

Vector Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

This is mildly off topic, although more on topic than many of the postings I see here :-)...

I used my 486 DX2 50 Mhz with 28 MB RAM as my my main computer for a while, and I found that Vector Linux worked quite nicely, especialy as it has an old version of X that actually worked with my video card. That and FVWM, and I had reasonably fast GUI desktop.

I guess a more customizeable distro like Debian or Gentoo, or manualy installing like described here, might be technicaly have been better, but on the other hand, I had to download it by 14400 dial up, so I wanted a small package that didn't need updating and further downloads. And for a relitive newbie, not having to know what (or how) to install is nice...

Woody with X windows runs in 32 Mb RAM

[dsfd]

My pentium MMX 166 laptop with 32 Mb RAM runs woody with X windows. The only trick is NOT use KDE or gnome but a small window manager. There are several to choose in the distribution. I have used the machine for presentations with acroread, playing games with xmame, music playing with xmms, even parallel code development with xemacs, gcc, and MPI (LAM).

As far as I know, Debian is the best distribution for small systems. I think it would have been perfectly possible to install it in the thinkpad described in the paper.

Lthe lightest linux ever

[supergiovane]

A linux kernel with a statically linked 'hallo world' program as init (From power up to Bash prompt howto).

Hey, it wouldn't do much, but it's linux, it boots from a 386 without hard disk, and most of all it doesn't require a keyboard. Obviously, if you want a decent performance you need a P4 2.8 GHz.

The lightest linux ever

[supergiovane]

A linux kernel with a statically linked 'hallo world' program as init (From power up to Bash prompt howto).

Hey, it wouldn't do much, but it's linux, it boots from a 386 without any hard disk, and most of all it doesn't require a keyboard. Obviously, if you want a decent performance you need a P4 2.8 GHz with SCSI RAID (the world could get upset if I don't greet it properly only for a disk failure).

Humbug

[cookd]

It took a lot of searching and a few false starts, but I finally got Linux going on my old laptop a few years ago. I guess I did it mostly for the challenge.

Specs:

386sx @ 16Mhz
5 Megs RAM (subtract a bit for BIOS shadowing...)
240MB HDD (half DOS, half Linux ext2)
No PCMCIA, Ethernet, or IR ports.
Currently boots MS-DOS/Win3.1 and then uses LoadLinux.
Installed: Perl, GCC tool chain, vi, and just barely enough of everything else to get by.

I tried FreeBSD first -- that's what I normally run on my Unix boxes. However, while it can run on 5MB, it is a real challenge to get it installed with only 5MB -- the installer needs 8MB, and with no swap partition set up, it can only use RAM.

I came to the conclusion that the main problem with running a nice OS on not-so-nice hardware is getting a swap partition set up. Once Linux and FreeBSD have a little virtual memory to use, they can get by on just 4MB. But until the swap partition is mounted, everything has to squeeze into that 4MB, and it simply doesn't work.

I tried a few other distros before I finally found something that worked. It was called "ZipHam Linux." It was a derivative of Slackware running 2.0.38, and specialized for HAM radio enthusiasts. Once I had a swap partition set up, I could actually do stuff. I transferred packages via MS-DOS's InterLnk (parallel cable) and upgraded to the latest kernel I thought would work.

Recompiling the kernel on a 386sx with 4MB of RAM is an exercise in patience. I think it took about 23 hours. But it compiled! Yay. And booted.

About a year later, I graduated from college, got a better job, and bought a more reasonable laptop. As a result, the old one doesn't see much use anymore. But I still think it is pretty cool. And since it is actually the only Linux box in the house (1 FreeBSD box, and I run Linux under Bochs occasionally, but no other hardware dedicated to Linux), I sometimes fire it up just for kicks.

Re:386SX16, 4M RAM... - Even Worse !

[wtarreau]

In 1995, I installed an http proxy + mail server + dialup router + firewall for a customer. It was
based on linux 1.2 + a few tools (sendmail for the MTA, webroute for the proxy). All this fit on a
386SX-16, 2MB RAM (1.9 MB in fact, because of I had to keep 128 kB for shadow ram), 20 MB Hdd, and a
3c505 ISA ethernet NIC (yes, that big prehistoric board). I think I used a slackware 2, though I'm
not sure. I couldn't install an http cache because the disk was nearly full and I had to
keep some space for the mails ! This setup was really tight, but rather stable and lasted about
3 years. They eventually got rid of it when a new
director came in, and didn't want all his
employees to browse the net so easily :-(

I even remember crashing the box while stupidly trying "swapoff -a"...

What a heroic moment !

Willy

I'm not going to touch the command line

[commodoresloat]

Until the Microsoft Command Line Interpreter is finished.

DeLi linux

[Anonymous Coward]

what about DeLi linux (http://delilinux.berlios.de/):

"DeLi Linux stands for 'Desktop Light' Linux. It is a Linux Distrinution for old computers, from 486 to Pentium MMX 166 or so. It's focussed on desktop usage. It includes email clients, graphical webbrowser, an office package with word processor and spreadsheet, an dso on. A full install, including XFree and development tools, needs not more than 300 MB of harddisk space."

Finally!

[genka]

A featherweight OS for my paperweight PC!

PDA's are not small anymore (Sharp Zaurus)

[bockman]

Well, not CPU-wise or RAM-wise, at least. Take the Sharp Zaurus: 200MHz ARM processor, 64 MB ram + 16MB ROM,TFT LCD 3.5" with 240x320 pixel, 65,536 colors. And if you have enough money, you can add to it an IBM 1GB micro-drive.
I'm dreaming to use it as a substitute for the 5-years-old laptop I currently carry around : Pentium 150 MHz, 80 MB, 1.4 GB, 10" DSCN LCD 800x600. It would be sweet to have a full-featured PC in your pocket(almost).

Not Linux, but....

[octalgirl]

Many moons ago I made a 31/2" disk bootable to a stripped down version of Windows 3.1 with a stripped down WordPerfect 5.1, and it even included a HP LaserJet II driver. And I managed to leave solitaire on it too. I used to give them to guys who were going on travel before laptops became commonplace. There is usually a lot of bloat in any OS or software package.

Re:*Scratches_head* Um?

[lichtkind]

a-a=0 0*x =0 2a*0=a*0

Re:FreeBSD may be an option

[benwb]

You can also grab a stage 3 tarball for gentoo- basically it's everything precompiled. You lose the benefits of targeting your specific architecture, but gentoo has a lot of nice other stuff going for it too.

you all talk about speed demons

[Anonymous Coward]

besides my athalon 1800, my laptop is a
8086 running at ??? 1 mhz maybee?
1 mb ram.
10 mb hard drive, amazingly enough...
320x240 monochrome display,
and a full size keyboard.
I love this sytem. running dos 6.22 it runs a text editor for a full 8 hours on one battery. and is the smallest and lightest laptop i have ever seen. virtually indestructable, and has an external 1.44 meg floppy drive and internal 2400 baud modem. only problem is tha it wont install a lot of software that pops up an error saying somthign about protected mode required... I don't think it will run linux, any one have any idea's on that?

featherweight - NetBSD

[ChristTrekker]

I recently installed NetBSD on a Mac SE/30 (16 MHz 68030) with 8 MB RAM. From the bit of tinkering I've done, it runs pretty well. It's also a pretty svelte installation.

I thought you needed a 100Mhz to play mp3s?

[emil]

From man mpg123:

MPEG audio decoding requires a good deal of CPU perfor- mance, especially layer-3. To decode it in realtime, you should have at least a Pentium, Alpha, SuperSparc or equivalent processor. You can also use the -singlemix option to decode mono only, which reduces the CPU load somewhat for layer-3 streams. See also the -2 and -4 options.

Re:I thought you needed a 100Mhz to play mp3s?

[Chromium_One]

MPEG audio decoding requires a good deal of CPU

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough. That poor little 386 wasn't decoding the MP3's, just acting as a fileserver. Streaming data to clients on LAN. It seemed to max out at somewhere around 2.5Mbps.

Try to find some Parity RAM

[DysonSphere]

30 pin i'm assuming... The "Busy Bee Robot Ram"
just isn't going to cut it in one of those ;-)

Re:Try to find some Parity RAM

[RAMMS EIN]

No...it's 72 pins. I have IBM-branded modules, but even they don't work; they all give a memory error during POST. Maybe I need parity...well, I really don't wanna invest money in that box, so I'll just run Linux in 4MB, and GNU/FreeDOS, of course. ;-)

---
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Re:Try to find some Parity RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and probably 80ns as well.... or some odd number. Do you have the FRU#'s of the ones that work?

Check around the MicroChannel pages, see if you can find a reference.

BTW my PS/1 486/25sx w/ 4mb and 500Mb ran great till I tried to put a 1Gb hdd in it. Stupid IBM IDE controllers/BIOS.

My PS/2 MOD 80 486/33 with 46MB and 500MB runs Slack 8.0 as my database server (scsi, and a buttload of ram means it's not to slow).

Gotta love IBM Hardware
TE

my 760 must be deluxe

[twitter]

The LD I got (used but in the orignial box!), came with a 150 Pentium and a CD ROM which you had to swap out the floppy to use. All hardware was recognized automatically by the vanilla kernel, and irronically it's one of the few machines I have with working audio. PCMCIA has got to be one of the coolest things ever. The only PC card I've ever had a problem with was a combined modem ehternet card that I could only see the ethernet on. A seperate modem card fixed that nicely. The IDE floppy might throw some for a loop until they realize its a /dev/hd_something. As a terminal, it's very nice. If I had wireless in house, it would be awsome.

does a fileserver really need http, ftp, and mail daemons running?

I have proftpd running on it to get files off easily when I go someplace that does not have an ftp server. I suppose that I could run NFS but the places I got that don't have ftp are likely not to have NFS either.

As for my 486 gateway, I'd love to run mail and http daemons on it. Exim, a nice little mail server IS running on it but COX blocks the inbound requests. One day they will block everthing but digital cable TV and call it convergence, but that is a different rant. There are several light http deamons that would do just fine for serving the few static pages I try to share over ftp. One day, I'll configure one to run on something besides port 80 to see if I can get around Cox.

386/33, 5M/70M

[ecloud]

That was my first Linux server back in '94. (Yes really 5 megs memory, I had 4 1M SIMMs and 4 256K SIMMs) One 40M Seagate 251 for /usr and some old 30 meg full-height beast for /. I had an RLL card and I think maybe I had converted the drives to RLL by then, but I forget exactly... I also had an ISP which was tolerant of my 24/7 connection, and even gave me a subdomain (ecloud.goodnet.com) so I could run a web server. Ah the memories...

Where do you get 'old'?

[JoeCommodore]

"This looks kind of interesting for those who want to run a feather weight Linux on really old hardware."

It looks like you run it on contemporary x86 hardware, not Z80 or 6502, or even 4004, how do you see *really old* here. :-(

Of course if you want a REALLY OLD hardware Unix variation, you can always look at LUnix for the Commodore 64.

History Lesson...

[Quixadhal]

While I applaud the author's work in finding the newest tools to do what he wants, I must point out that he didn't HAVE to do it that way.

Go find yourself an *OLD* slackware distribution. When I first started getting into linux, it was with slackware, and it was running on a then-shiny-new 486/33 with 4 Megs of RAM and a giant 400Meg hard drive. Installation was via floppy, and an NE2000 was added later.

So, it's not that no prime-time distributions can be installed on small hardware.. no CURRENT ones can. In that respect, Linux has (to some degree) forgotten its roots and I applaud those who are trying to find their way back. I'm happy that Microsoft has bloated things so much that I have a 1.5GHz cpu on my desk, but I'd sure love to see what it can really do with the kind of efficient small code we had back when 100MHz was uber-fast!

Re:*Scratches_head* Um?

[Valkyre]

was supposed to be greaterthan/equal, but the parser doesn't seem to like greaterthans

So a really tiny Linux would be, what....

[Anonymous Coward]

...Clitorix?

Slackware could do it..

[Anonymous Coward]

It was only a few years ago that I got slackware running on a 386 with 4 megs of ram on a 420 meg drive with gcc and X (using fvwm2) both fully functional. X was rediculous because of the need for ram to keep swapping back to the disk. It couldn't be expected to be of much use without at least 8 megs of ram.

I haven't tried this with modern slackware but I see no reason why this shouldn't be possible. Slackware hasn't changed all that much. The article claims it requires 12 megs of ram for the install. I seriously doubt that. Anyone know what he's talking about? And even if that is the case why not just make a few swap files or a swap partition from the very beginning. Debian is another system that could probably do this without much trouble.

I do appreciate the usage of packages from embedded systems. We've definitely should learn something by looking at systems like qnx and wondering why we can't do everything so nice and clean.

Re:*Scratches_head* Um?

[Black Copter Control]

a-a=0 0*x =0 2a*0=a*0

My grade 10 math teacher dropped this one on us. He started with A=B which makes the 0/0 thing a bit less obvious. It actually got me into doing some real thinking. The interesting thing about this proof is the step that goes from

(a+a)(a-a)=a(a-a)
to
(a+a)=a
You essentially have to divide both sides by a-a. (this proof is more interesting if you start with A=B because you end up dividing by A-B) In any case, you end up with 0/0.
X=0/0

Ignoring, for a moment, that your math teacher always tells you to never play with '0/0', and pull the 0 over to the other side....
It turns out that you're looking for a value of X that satisfies the equation:
X*0=0

Anything satisfies this equation... Real numbers imaginary numbers, etc.

That's actually why this mess of a proof 'works'.

When I took an honors calculus course, the whole thing fell together. Calculus spins around the concept of getting as close as possible to 0/0 without actually being there. More specifically:

Calculus is based on the premise that 0/0 can be anything you want, depending on how you approach it.

Why not just get an older version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like you could just start with something like slackware 2.0, and it would be no problem.

I used to run Linux with "X" windows, and a seemingly complete set of stuff on a 486 with 100mb of disks, and 16mb of memory --- oh yeah, the machine also had a full windows 3.1 distro on it..

Re:FreeBSD may be an option

[Cro Magnon]

NetBSD even installs with 4MB RAM. I even tried to install it with 3.8 MB RAM usable but that was not possible (fdisk ran out of memory).

I guess those toasters that NetBSD gets installed on have at least 4MB RAM.

But is it 34% as geeky?

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

Well this looks like something that might give my old PCs some new life. I would suspect with the scaled-back interface, it is as geeky as older releases.