Slashdot Mirror
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."
Your best bet is to roll your own, following the instructions at Linux From Scratch. It takes some time, but you can squeeze every bit of performance out of that machine that way.
Would be your best bet. I've run it on just such a system. Can you say "recompile the kernel" I knew you could.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I thought that was what Debian 386 (i.e. not x86) was for. :)
What's wrong with an old version of slackware? or heck, even a new version of slackware, I bet.
I installed slackware on a 486sx laptop with 4MB of RAM and only a floppy drive, (although they've since dispensed with the disksets) and it ran just fine. X was slow, but that's par for the course, deal with it.
Really, I don't see why the distribution matters as much as the software you're putting on it. I mean, if you install KDE, it's going to be dog-slow. That's KDE. Try installing blackbox or fvwm or even windowmaker: all fairly lightweight-but-usable window managers. Every distro has them (almost).
It's not a matter of picking an old enough distro, it's a matter of picking your software wisely. No, a "default install" will not cut it. You're going to have to be selective. If you're low on disk space, try nano, vi, jed or jove instead of emacs. as far as X-based edtiors go, you might as well forget about it. On a 486, even kedit is pretty heavyweight.
Random and weird software I've written.
Older Debian Distributions:
http://archive.debian.org/dists/
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
It runs windows 3.11 and opera 3.62 at very impressive speeds, given its age. It just goes to show how much of an overkill modern CPUs are for most people's needs. My mother does the internet on it: As long as you dont stumble upon a website with lots of flash or pop-ups, even IE5 runs acceptably! :)
What I've been thinking, and here's the part that's useful to you, is if it wouldnt be a whole lot faster to just run it as a VNC client and let my speedy box do the actual processing and disk-spinning. I did download the dos VNC client but apparently its for 32-bit dos prompts and not real 16-bit ms-dos?
I guess I could try my hand at some sort of LFSish setup but I'm still a bit of a n00b
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.Install lrp or ipcop and use it as a router/firewall, it should be ok for that sort of use.
It may be ok as a print server for a lan, but I'm not so sure about that - maybe a minimal install would cover it.
Oh, even though I'm an emacs man (or t.h.e. for some stuff) I really wouldn't install it here, either :-) Small is beautiful here.
I hereby inform you that I have NOT been required to provide any decryption keys.
I used Debian Slink, but I have access to a broadband internet connection. The X Configuration was a major pain. You should look into a mini distribution that comes with TinyX or something based on UCLibC if you really want the most bang for your download time. Remember, VesaFB is your friend.
I'm also looking for a distro specifically for old 486's, but I am yet to find one. I have run across this commercial OS, though, which is pretty cool.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
2488MB may seem to be a big download for 56k, but remember that you are getting a fully working system with packages included. It used to be that all us suckers had to download huge stuff on 56k modems.
(waits to be modded down for mentioning *BSD.)
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
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.
openbsd. it runs great on my soekris net4501 (486/133 - 64mb - 32mb compact flash disk). you can follow the procedure outlined here in the openbsd faq to get up and running on a system with less than 32mb of ram
I have a 486 w/ 16MB of RAM and a 700 MB hard drive that FreeBSD 4.7 happily resides on. I just use NFS to mount my main machine's port tree and have access to all those apps ported to FreeBSD. Sorry I forgot... BSD is dead.
That should have said: I downloaded Slink, but ended up using Potato... for exactly the reasons you cite. It's late...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Switching distros isn't going to help much. A distro is a distro is a distro. The problem is that X has a larger constant overhead than GUIs of the day did -- yank X off the machine and it'll be a decent server.
May we never see th
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.
Bush Lies Watch
You can download NetBSD 1.5.3 base and X or get a cdrom and it may work for you. Use blackbox as the WM or something small (no gnome or kde) and you should be okay. You'll be able to run many apps too. You can use links -gui for a decent gui web browser that does not take up lots of ram or cpu.
Only 'flamers' flame!
I have a collection of older machines (see my web page) some of which are quite bit slower than most 486's. I've found that when it comes to memory utilization, and hard drive space requirements, NetBSD is a good contender. You can reduce the memory footprint by recompiling the kernel (just like Linux), and get away with a usable system in 20 megs (without man pages or system source files).
I'm not trying to disuade you from installing Linux by this comment (I love Debian), just telling you about my OS of choice for older machines.
Success is as dangerous as failure, hope as hollow as fear.
I'm seriously thinking about installing gentoo on a 486, 16MB, and just for grins, do it via floppy and dial-up. As long as the phone line stays up while I need it, I imagine I can get Gentoo installed in about one month.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
However, it's likely to get owned pretty fast if you just put a stock, say, RH4.2 machine out in the world. What might not be a bad idea is to take 6.2, compile the latest 2.2 series kernel with no bells and whistles, and minimize the hoggish servers running on the box. It can obviously be made to be much quicker than a standard 6.2 install.
I like music
Ever.
I've got a similar box here. Installed RedHat 7.x (7.1 or 2 I think) on it with no problems.
/usr/doc (or wherever it is all located now).
;)
The best way to approach this is to do a minimal text-mode install, and then slowly add the files you need to make it useable. Yes, you will end up installing some packages you don't need (or can't use!) such as Mesa, but they won't slow you down. If harddrive space is an issue, start paring down such things as documentation: Install a minimal set of man pages and rm -r
Next, make sure you can get X up and running with a light window manager. That rules out KDE, Gnome, and pretty much everything that's been "new" in the past 5 years. When set up right, FVWM can be both fast and functional. Personally, I found Windowmaker a bit too slow for a low-end 486.
If you can get some more RAM, get it! If not, tweak carefully. Cut everywhere you can to turn off EVERY service that you don't really need. I know, lots will end up getting swapped out, but not all (you don't really need cron, do you?)...
Also, make the services and programs that you *do* need as light-weight as possible. Limit your fonts and pixmaps in X, use a lightweight terminal (rxvt) instead of xterm, etc. Top (man top) sorting by memory usage is your friend. For software you just can't run on that machine and don't have a viable replacement for, don't forget that you can run them on another machine. Just ssh to it and fire up Mozilla there!
What you shouldn't waste your time on is custom builds of things. It's not worth it. I've tried. If you know what you're doing, you will save 15k of RAM by custom-building your kernel. It won't be noticably faster, and you'll just be dissapointed. Of course, it is a great learning experience!
It's only software!
The RULE Project was mentioned here on Slashdot back in February. It may not be ready for prime-time yet, but they seem to be trying to do the same thing as you: run an up to date version of Redhat on minimal (486/32MB RAM) hardware.
These distros were what I was using years and years hence. I recall running a stripped-down Slack 3.0 on a '386-16 laptop with 4MB of RAM and an 80MB HDD. (No kidding. It was an AT&T Safari-- remember those? If you squinted just right, you could swear the front of the case said "Satan" instead of "Safari". Or maybe that was the demons in my head taunting me. ;) )
Red Hat 4.2 used to run just dandy on desktops I had with around the level of hardware power you're talking about.
If you want to be lean and mean, go with Slackware. If you want something a bit more user-friendly/desktop-ish, go with Red Hat. However, I must say that installing Slackware 3.0 was never terribly hard for me. It was the first time I installed Linux, and the whole process went rather smoothly. If you know any existing modern distros well enough, Slack 3 should be a cakewalk for you.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
I have some old machines, and I run kde3 on them, with open office and mozilla. How? I actuallly run everything off a main server, and just export the display. My old machines don't have any hard disks, just a floppy disk drive, mobo, video card and ethernet card.
See ltsp.org for more details.
again?
- undoware.ca
I turned an old 486 with 24MB and a 500MB hard drive into a perfectly acceptable nat router/firewall/traffic shaper/dns cache for a cable modem in my previous house running OpenBSD. It ran really well and after recompiling the kernel it never used more than 14MB at most.
I am currently staying with friends who also use a 486 to share and firewall their cable modem using the Linux based IPCop. Setting up old 486s to do this is more flexible and much cheaper than buying a dedicated hardware router (although they also tend to be a bit noiser).
Slackware is where it's at for older machines. I put 7.1 on a 486dx2-50 laptop with 12megs of ram and a 200 mb harddisk. The only thing that was really limiting was such a small disk. Since many older machines may only have floppy drives, Slack really shines becuase of the fact that it supports floppy installs. (I think they may have just recently discontinued this, but I'm pretty sure the fairly modern 7.x Slacks still supported it.) Really the only thing I'd be even semi-worried about on your machine would be the speed of the cpu. You might look into getting a new 486 chip for it (say, off ebay or something; a working 486-dx at 66 to 100 mhz shouldn't cost you more than a buck or two) if your motherboard supports swapping in a higher spec part. (You'd probably be ok with 33, but if you can get 66 or higher for less time and money than a cheeseburger, why not? ;))
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
debian 3.0 (woody) is actually quite easy to pare down for use on older systems, and you benefit by having newer, stabler, more secure versions of any programs you'd like to run ... i've got it on an old 486 here acting as the house firewall, and the total install is somewhere around 121MB, plus swap space ... i took out all the documentation, man pages, the system sources (headers and crap), and any packages i didn't need/want ... it runs a 2.4 kernel and a few services, notably iptables and dhcpd ... doesn't have X, though, which it seems like what you're looking for ... if you want just a decent web browser machine, i'd suggest getting a 2.4 kernel with framebuffer support enabled and running gpm and elinks in the console ... mmm ... text-mode browser with tables and mouse support ...
09
You obviously have never installed Gentoo from stage1.
The process leaves you with plenty of time for other activities.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I have a stripped down Debian firewall. Debian is not the easiest to trim down. Some of the dependancies really complicate matters. (ex: Exim depends on openldap, even if you don't need the ldap support.) Not that you can't trim down Debian it just not as easy as starting with a smaller distro to begin with.
Start with Slackware or better still OpenBSD. OpenBSD is everything you need in a *nix install and nothing more. My old OpenBSD 2.7 is only 320MB with X v3. 70MB of that is additional packages. This mostly default install includes X, gcc, apache, and 15MB of perl. Samba, Vim, and Emacs were installed from packages.
Here was an article on Slashdot a week or so ago http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/1 1/10/2214253&mode=thread&tid=106 about a small sized Linux using BusyBox and a GLibC compatible library that is pretty small. It installs off 3 floppies. I havnt gotten around to trying BusyBox or the library so I dont know how well X or X apps will run off it, but if you run a smaller desktop like FVWM or BlackBox, it might work with decent performance. Its worth a look into. If worse comes to worse, try an alternative to Linux and run something like FreeBSD or OpenBSD, or even a non-*nix like FreeDOS.
Just as a quick followup. A complete base install of OpenBSD 3.2 (all *.tgz, no source) is only about 300MB. The install guide claims that a minimal install would be about 100MB.
A number of early distros can be found on Ibiblio's ftp site.
Or you could get this just for fun.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
- Linux Kernel 2.2 (with low memory i would recommend 2.2..) or a really stripped-down 2.4 kernel, running a modern distro which is rather slick in itself, like Slackware or Debian. This will help you avoiding numerous security holes in older distros.
- There has been an article which focusses on small yet functional destop programs.
- If you want to go with really stripped-down distros, which are suitable (or optimized) for embedded computers, check this link.
- I have to agree with some of the other posters that one of the *BSD derivates can be and feel a lot smaller than full-featured, KDE3-based Linux distros...
- If security is not much of an issue for you, for whatever reason, you might want to go for an outdated Linux distro. Watch out for a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel, and libc5 instead of glibc2/libc6, or you might not gain much from the old stuff... Or even Minix?
VSTa?
I have been running couple of very humble 486-based boxen with some of these things lately for quite some time as well, it can be a nice and productive experience if you adjust to the capabilities of the granny hardware.. And it surely teaches you patience