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Breathing Life Into Older Computers
Aron writes "ASE Labs has written an article on using a light distribution of Linux, Damn Small Linux, to power an older computer. With Linux, older computers can be useful once again for many people. From the article: "The oldest computer I have is a Pentium 266 MMX laptop with 64MB of RAM. Most people would just consider this to be garbage and junk it, and if you brought this in for service where I work, I would agree with you. While this laptop might seem old and out-of-date now, it is small and light. I needed something I could easily carry around, so I figured I would see what I could salvage out of this dinosaur. Windows would have a hard time running on this low-spec laptop, but there are many distributions of Linux that will work exceptionally well.""
I've got a Toshiba Portege 233 that still has win98 on it; and its perfect for Outlook, Exceed (for X windows), Excel, and VPN software (and the occaisional web browsing).
I've also got a Pentium 166 (198 MB ram) with the same set up.
They're being phased out infavor of my Mac, but clean installs in windows with only a few applications on them can give you a long and happy life.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I got RH 8 on a p90 with 32M Ram. No desktop or anything else graphical, but it is able to run Apache and Samba. It was a coll little server.
This is actually a distribution that I think will find many fans. I have so much hardware I'd like to donate to my church or local teen center but I know wouldn't run WinXP.
Personally, I've been looking for a throw-away cheap laptop so I can word process on-the-go. My previous model was a Sony VAIO model (PCG-N505VX I believe) with no CD or DVD (useless for me), a gorgeous display, and it was thinner than any laptop I'd ever seen. The processor was a P2-333 I believe, and it did everything I needed it to do (it was the first PC I had with Firewire built in).
Unfortunately, I dropped it once too many times, and it's $sys$. I hate Sony now, but I am desperate to find a similar laptop. I'd gladly install a thin version of Linux, but I am worried about driver support on some of these old notebooks. For me, video driver support is REALLY important (I need fast video as I do tend to swap between windows at incredible speed).
Currently I perform almost all my writing and editing on my Pocket PC Phone with an external keyboard, but it isn't keeping up with my volume. I may go find a used N505VX as the form factor was perfect, and searching the web shows numerous people with successful Linux installs on this unit. I was holding off on replacing my portable because I didn't want to screw with Linux and I knew it was my only real option.
The article is now in my bookmarks, I've been banging my head trying to find a deposit of information on using Linux with ancient hardware. Having a preassembled distro is a huge plus, I hate wasting time tinkering with any production-quality machine.
Why not buy a new unit? Honestly, money isn't the problem. For me, the new laptops are way overburdened with hardware and features that I would NEVER need. I have yet to see a new SMALL monitor on a thin minimalist laptop that works as well as my old N505 did, as brightly as it did, with battery life as good as it had.
I can definitely agree that Windows XP wouldn't run well on the laptop, yet my Win2K install was pretty decent (I needed a ton of RAM though, and the article is aimed at 64MB dinosaurs).
I have a Compaq P100 laptop. I set up a dual-boot for Debian and FreeDOS, and it now spends its days as a slave to my C64, bypassing the notoriously slow 1541 snaildrive.
Cheers,
Ian
My parents only recently upgraded their 166MHz PII with 64MB memory that was running Windows NT 4.0 exceptionally well. It worked fine for browsing the web, etc, albeit being a little slow on large flash animations
Can I load this ultra-light version of Linux onto my old computer with 64 MB of RAM and then run Open Office and Firefox at blazing speed? I don't think this is going to make my applications magicaly need less CPU/RAM.
I'm so jealous! I only have a 486 Laptop with 8mb RAM. Actually, it's quite fun to bring older computers to life so you can experiment with them in ways you'd be afraid to on a newer computer you use constantly.
Most people would just consider this to be garbage and junk it, and if you brought this in for service where I work, I would agree with you.
I think it's kind of lame when people just discard computers, there's a lot you could do with them aside from throwing them in the dumpster. You could take them to a GoodWill/Habitat For Humanity/Whatever, recycle them, or even use them for something trivial. There are still a lot of people out there who don't have a computer.
$fortune
Tomorrow has been canceled due to lack of interest.
Well, yes, Win98 runs on old hardware, but I'll wager any attempt to run Win98, on say, a Pentium Classic 233 with 128mb of RAM as a firewall for a network of about twenty machines, or as a Postfix mail proxy filtering out distributed dictionary attacks that count in the hundreds of thousands a day, would end in madness. However, I have two old machines in that power range doing these things right now, one running Slackware 10 and one which I'm experimenting with Ubuntu.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I have a IBM Model 80 386 16Mhz with 6megs of ram running OS/2 Warp 4, connected to the internet with a 3Com MCA Ethernet card.
I have put two Seagate 9Gb full hieght SCSI drives in it and it weighs about 1000lbs, +-900lbs.
Although it only has a screen resolution of 640 x 480 at 256 colors, I am running Mozilla 1.7 on it.
It doubles as my fax server.
It is slow but it gets the job done.
Try that with Windoze.
As long as you've got harddrive space, most older distro's work fine on hardware down to 100mhz. I've got a number of 300mhz boxes running Red Hat 7.3, and they do fine as firewalls and low end FTP servers. Got an old BSD box running named that I don't even know the stats on, and I'm afraid to reboot it, for fear it'll never come back up.
Fedora Core IV was the first distro that wouldn't run on my old PIII 700, so it got refurbed and passed off as a firewall to a friend of mine running FCII with no gui. I could have recompiled the kernel to support the old coppermine architecture, but it was worth the 120.00 dollars to me to upgrade to a much faster AMD processor.
I'm all in favor of keeping the older boxes running and useful, but after a point you have to consider diminishing returns. Recompiling a kernel (and then recompiling it again to put in the junk I forgot the first time) on my home network would have taken more of my life than I was willing to spend on a hopelessly obsolecent box.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I have an old DEC server with dual P-133s in it, and 96 megs of RAM. Back in the day, it must have been extremely expensive. About six years ago, I picked it up for $40. Right now it's my home router running Linux, but in the past I've installed Windows 2000 on it, and it was pretty usable.
Seeing that even maxing out my 6 megabit line doesn't get the load on the machine above 0.05, I keep thinking about doing something a bit more demanding with it, but in reality, I'll probably just be lazy and let it sit there. It's nice and quiet, passive heat sinks and everything.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I like it too, but each has its place.
Puppy is designed to be small, attractive and usable. A normal person might chafe slightly at not having his favorite application represented, but most day to day things will be adequately supported.
DSL is designd to be small as possible, no trade-offs or nods towards sanity at all. A normal person will want to gouge his eyeballs out with a ball point pen after using it for any length of time.
I'd say if you can run Puppy rather than DSL, do it. But DSL serves an important purpose when even Puppy is too big.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's not necessarily true that older=unreliable. Many older systems don't need fans (fewer moving parts to break), and are over-engineered to a remarkable degree - I have PSUs from the 80's that operated 24x7 for a decade and a half and are still servicable (though not presently in use). More recent boxes burn through their fans and PSUs in a couple of years.
For a long time I ran a 20 MHz 80386 with 8MB RAM as my firewall+SMTP+DNS server. Worked fine on a broadband connection, 24x7 for 5 years, in a dusty basement, and moved a *lot* of data; I only took it out of service when I moved. (Of course, it took over two days to compile the kernel for it in the first place, but that's another story). If I took a 'current' box I'll bet it would die in those conditions in 18 months.
I've thought the same thing. I find it hard to believe that somebody, somewhere, hasn't already done it -- it seems like an obvious step to take if you wanted to run a bunch of thin clients without much disk storage.
/.) there aren't -- at least to my knowledge -- very many easy to use distros that let you do it out of the box. If somebody can prove me wrong on this I'd be pleased, since I've always been interested in playing around with thin-client stuff, but it's seemed rather daunting to get into.
For everything you hear about using old hardware as thin x-server clients to run applications remotely (which comes up pretty often here on
If somebody felt like putting together a bootable distro, suitable for low-end or old hardware, that would fit on a business-card CD or inexpensive USB flash drive, and do nothing but let the machine work as an x-server over a secure connection and run remote applications, I think there's a definite demand for it (especially if it had a matching "thick" server/x-client distro).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Of course im being an ass, but really.. the IIGs was a bitchin machine for its time... color and sound and eventually a 40 meg hd that is still not full. We actually still use it, some games on there are irreplaceable and just dont feel the same played on a emulater... Long live my GS! :)
I have a 486 25mHz laptop (Compaq Contura 4/25c to be specific) with all my old favourite DOS games on it, and I wouldn't junk it for the world! You could even play quake on a Pentium 266!
You can use ndis wrappers, but this is a simple alternative that works better for old laptops:
There you have it. No need to dig through "thousands of posts" for serial numbers and all that Windoze-like jazz. Linux, when you give it friendly equipment, just works. There's enough friendly equipment and stores that you don't need the other shit. Let them feel the pain instead of you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.