Antique Distros?

An anonymous reader asks: "I've got an old 486 that isn't doing anything (it has RedHat 6.2 on it and even that barely works), and I have been considering installing an even older distribution to make it more usable. I'm looking for something I can download still, has a good bit of programs, has X, and is still a relatively reasonable download for a 56K modem. I would like to download the distro with my new computer, then burn a CD or do something like that to install it on my old computer. The computer is a 486 at 33Mhz with 16MB RAM and a 1.5GB HDD. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated."

Comments

Don't use old tools

[Professor Collins]

By forcing yourself to downgrade to older system software, you are foolishly limiting yourself from running the hundreds of new and useful apps that have been released for Linux lately, most of which depend on the latest versions of the kernel and libc (or binary-compatible substitutes). Not to mention there are hundreds of security holes in old Linux distros that have only been patched in the latest versions of the included software.

I too faced this dilemma when trying to make use of a batch of 486 machines donated to our computer lab. My solution required a bit of elbow grease, but ensured that my machines both ran acceptably and had the latest and most secure versions of software available to them:

• I built a Gentoo Linux system on the Athlon XP 2000+ machine in the lab, targetting all the software for 486 (gcc -O3 -m486 -march=486 -fomit-frame-pointer -s) and building a very stripped-down 2.4 kernel with only the bare necessities. I also replaced the standard GNU shell tools with BusyBox and GNU libc with uC-libc. On this fast machine, the compilation cycle didn't take long, and I was able to build and install everything into a temporary /install directory in less than four hours.
• Once that was done, i tarred up the /install directory I had built and burned it onto an ISO along with a bootimage from tomsrtbt mini-Linux distro.
• I then booted each 486 machine in turn from the CD, and used a shellscript I had written which created an ext2 partition, formatted it, and untarred the contents of my custom gentoo setup onto the disk, and set up grub to boot into it.

With all this done, I was able to quickly and easily convert these seemingly worthless 486 machines into reasonable X terminals. Gentoo's e-merge infrastructure ensures that maintenance is easy, and that I have full control over the compilation process. This way, I can tailor every app to get maximum performance out of the limited but still substantial power of the 486 chip.

One thing to be wary of

[Tim_F]

A lot of older distros (Mandrake and RedHat) will no longer be supported. So be wary if you're going to put this machine on the net. It may be very likely that there are security holes in some of the packages, and your machine could be easily hacked.

Re:One option

[questionlp]

You don't have to download all four ISO images, but instead, you can download the mini ISO install image for FreeBSD 4.7 and use Ports to download and build the stuff that you need. You can also use CVSup to pull down the sources and enable compression over slower links.

The only problem is that the installer for the more recent FreeBSD versions require more than 8MB of RAM (12MB is the bare minimum I think). For firewall and/or router purposes, try out ClosedBSD which is based on PicoBSD (which in turn is based on an earlier release of FreeBSD). You can download the ISO from there.

For even a smaller install, NetBSD might do the trick, as well as OpenBSD.

OpenBSD and NetBSD

[Ivan Raikov]

Assuming you have more than 4 or 8MB of RAM, I would suggest try putting FreeBSD [freebsd.org] on it.

I'd also suggest trying out OpenBSD; I've been running it on an old ThinkPad wtih 486/25MHz processor and 12 MB of RAM. I can run Emacs 20.x and the OpenSSH server on that machine, and still have about 6 - 8 MB of free RAM. I use it mostly as a type-writer, but GCC 2.95 is perfectly usable on it.