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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."
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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
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.
...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. :-|
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
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
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.
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
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.
What kind of mainboard for a 486 would support an 80GB disk?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
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?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
They are currently working on win2K-XP version, but work is understanably slow.
Seriously, check it out!
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.)
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
"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.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
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.
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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.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
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.
http://saveie6.com/
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.
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.
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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)
.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
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
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
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."
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.
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.
--- have you healed your church website?