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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
run feather weight Linux on my brand new hardware. Imagine how fast that would be !!!
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.
That should run blazingly fast on my 100 Mhz pc. It currently just displays "operating system not found" upon boot up.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
Shouldn't someone host a mirror in case we slashdot IBM? =)
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
I already run a very svelt Linux. it's called SuSE.
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.
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.
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
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?
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.
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
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!
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.
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
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.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
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.
My first linux install was a 486DX2, witn a 66Mhz chip, 4Mb of ram, and I was installing onto an 80Gb hard drive.
Before this sounds like a "When I was a Boy" story, I could install X and gcc, but not at the same time. When I say I could install X, it would run
Just because something is possible, doesn't mean you want to do it.
Democracy isn't about no one telling you what to do. It's about everyone telling you what to do.
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.
- - - -
The real Tetsujin 28 is a giant robot.
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org
Also includes a CowboyNeal load of documentation!
"apt-get remove -purge *", right?
Wah!
They are currently working on win2K-XP version, but work is understanably slow.
Seriously, check it out!
"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.
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.
"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.
Or install linux on an AMD Hammer.
Same computing power.
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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 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.).
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.
This space intentionally left blank.
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.
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.
/dev/sda4, i.e. the zipdisk). Zipslack booted with only minor difficulties -- I had to tweak a couple of BIOS settings, that's all.
/dev/hda1"
/mnt/hd.
/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.
/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.
;P
Step 1. I have an external floppy that connects to the PCMCIA slot, and a parallel port zipdrive. So, I downloaded Zipslack (available on the Slackware website) and the companion, fourmeg.zip, which creates a swap file. Zipslack is interesting because it creates a UMSDOS slackware installation on a zipdisk (just unzip it to the zipdisk). This can then be booted from the zipslack boot floppy (boot from the boot floppy, then direct root at
2. Once in Zipslack, I had to set up the Itronix's hard disks for Linux. So, first, I fdisked, and set up most of each disk as a type 83 Linux partition, and the rest as a type 82 Linux swap. I probably gave too much swap; I took a guess for the "big" ones and made it like 88 cylinders; I think it turned out to be better than 128MB (I made it a LOT smaller on my little ones). Next, I formatted the disk: I ran the command:
"mke2fs -L armadillo -c -c -j
This surprised me a little, pleasantly: I knew the two "-c" params would cause it to overwrite the disk with nulls, but it did it FOUR TIMES, which is pretty damn thorough. Once that finished up (it took at least an hour on my old machines) I mounted the disk as type "ext3" on
3. Now, I copied my entire root directory onto the mount point, leaving out the loadlin stuff and files that were obviously DOS related (like the DOS mount directory). I copied each directory using (for example) "cp -a
4. This time, I pointed the root directory at
The result is that my little Linux machines all work perfectly!
On my "big" ones, I put a bunch more stuff in. I put in the development disk set, plus x, xap, most of n, and this coming week I'm adding kde and gnome. On my "little" ones, I've only got 260MB of space, so I'm going to stick with text-mode. I'm toying with the idea of using emacs as an environment for those, IF the e set will fit on 'em of course.
The most expensive of these laptops was 150.00. The cheapest was 25.00. Zipslack was free. Now, is that a great deal or what? Especially considering they're like indestructible little armadillo monsters, right?
Oh, by the way: I'm using Zipslack 8.1 and I'll probably upgrade to 9.0 when it comes out. Gotta love Slackware! Bob RULES!
BTW: my grammar isn't so hot today. It's the Marine Corps Birthday (10 Nov) and the "Marine Corps Drink" is the Rum and Coke, so cut me some slack there (ha! get it? SLACK! I slay me)...
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I just don't see how it is feasible to leave dozens of tiny utilities littered all over the root filesystem.
/bin/busybox "command" [optional flags] or you can symlink/hardlink it to [command] and run it like the ordinary command.
/bin, not much added elegance.
Busybox works two ways, either
If you do it the first way, busybox "command" you'd have to type the extra letters all the time. You can alias it, but then you'd have to have a support issue with all the users unless you had universal aliases, and thats not optimal.
If you do it the second way, with the symlinks or hardlinks, you still have all the things in
The code in busybox gets complicated. The added elegance in the file system becomes complications in the source code. Any updates to any of the "functions" as busybox calls them, requires an update to essentially all your userland utilities (as expressed in busybox). Lots of updates, lots of testing, because now any change to anytihng in busybox requires you to test everything, because a change in the ls "function" is in the same code that contains your mount command, and your cat, and your rm, etc., and now you need to test all of those as well.
Shared code can go into libraries. That's why libc is usually dynamically linked, shared code should be shared. You get your elegance with asmall executable with much of it's guts in shared libraries. Elegance here causes ugliness there. You pick your battles, you do things the way you want to. That said, busybox is opensource, and all of the gnu utilities are opensource as well. I don't think the busybox folks would mind patches from you or any others that share the view. I personally don't agree, my "elegance" is in smaller utilities with well defined functions, and I would not contribute.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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
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.
Full plate and packing steel! -Minsc
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
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 :)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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.
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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.
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.
Signatures are for stupids.
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.
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.