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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 While this laptop might seem old and out-of-date now, it is small and light.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.""
Not really news per se...most of us have known for a while now that Linux is a good strategy for reviving old systems that the latest M$ bloatware won't run on.
I like the PUPPY myself...give it a shot. ^_^
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
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 have an old pentium laptop running damnsmalllinux at home with a cheap wireless card I picked up off of ebay. Now I can sit on the couch and connect into my main machine and run whatever I want (firefox, gimp, whatever) and display it back to my laptop. Luckily damnsmalllinux can install with a boot floppy (since the laptop couldn't boot off of CD). Another nice distro is monkey linux. If you have to install via floppy on a really really old machine, this one is worth looking at. If you are going to buy an old laptop, try to get one with a bootable CD, or at the very least a floppy and CD, since installing via any other method on old hardware is torture (though slackware with a zip/ls120 drive isn't too bad).
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
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.
Damn Small Linux would probably run just fine on it. I was running Linux on a 233 AMD, back in 99 or so, and it ran much nicer than my Celly 450.
If you need a windowing system, try fluxbox. Its use of tabs make it much more powerful than other equivalent WMs.
I don't see why this is such a big question. Hasn't it already been done to death here and elsewhere?
If nothing else, you could use it as an X terminal to a much more powerful machine. I have a 700mhz Vaio that I'm using for that purpose.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
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
I run NetBSD on a 368DX40 with 16 MB of RAM. It runs fine -- a bit slow, of course, but quite serviceable for a server.
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.
Why mess with junk?
One geek's junk is a layman's treasure.
My church could use a few PCs. My local teen center could as well. I don't have $5000 in my budget to purchase them 10 PCs, but I probably have 15 PCs worth of hardware that could run Firefox and a basic word processor just perfectly with Damn Small Linux or another distro.
When I had my own P133 with a whopping 32 megs of RAM back in 1997, Windows ran just fine on it. My upgrade to Win98 on my next machine (a P300) was even better...so much so that I can still use that machine if my others go down. While I'm sure DSL or another distro are great for those boxes, older versions of Windows have never given me any problems either.
Talking about light Linux distributions: there is a list of so-called tiny Linux distributions in the Open Directory Project web site (aka DMOZ).
The list is available at:
Open Directory - Computers: Software: Operating Systems: Linux: Distributions: Tinye ms/Linux/Distributions/Tiny/
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Syst
Debian runs fine. A bunch of services, 24/7 server with shell accounts, mail, www, ftp and a bunch others. Upgrade from 16 to 24MB RAM gave it a new lease of life. Upgrade from 2GB to 20GB drive - another. And thanks to low power CPU, I just slapped an Athlon radiator on it instead of the original 486 one, then removed the fan. The drive is silent, the cooler in the PSU is dead already, so the machine is exceptionally quiet.
Recently I bought a serial terminal, an original 80-column amber screen Wyse, and pulled the serial cable to my bed. And now I find myself spending more time online chatting with people over IRC from that terminal, connected to the 486, than on the bulky Sempron box.
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I used to run RH6.1 (with KDE) on a P200MMX/96Mb
Hehe, code bloat has set in an my Fedora4 box runs about the same speed (3GHz/1Gb)
#include <sig.h>
I have exactly the same laptop. It's not a toshiba, is it? Why DSL though? I run gentoo on it. It runs great. Compile time wasn't bad, as I have a few other machines to distcc it with. And I can run X on it. Although, I recommend using FVWM for the window manager. It's hella lightweight, and highly configurable. The only downside is I haven't got standby/hibernation working yet. But, since it's so old, I threw in a second battery. So I get about 5 hours of constant use out of it.
In my house, I run my own web server, which doubles as my router. Originally, it was a Packard Bell running a Pentium 266 MHz processor with a paltry 64 MB of RAM, but a healthy 9 GB hard disk. After a while, the RAM constraints were too much and I upgraded to a Pentium II system simply because I needed more RAM, and I was worrying that some of the cooling fans were starting to go.
Still, I love these kinds of challenges, to try to push something older, to repurpose it for a modern usage, and to see just how far you can go.
Rawr
Site seems to be down - or at least running slow. Here is the Coral Cache link:
http://www.aselabs.com.nyud.net:8090/
Matthew Grint Midnight Artists
Hehehe... I guess it depends on what you define as "old". I have a dual P II 450 with 768 Megs of RAM that I consider to be standard "entry level". I bought it in 1997/98 and it's been serving me well as an application server with Linux for quite a few years. This is the way computing is SUPPOSED to work. None of this stupid disposable crap. I am currently running RH 9 on it with all the latest apps like Firefox, OpenOffice 2.0, VNC4, etc... It performs at least as fast as a P4 1 Ghz system running Windows XP Pro. So much for the argument to run Windows...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Here's a similar story of using old hardware with NetBSD:
r e_rescue.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/05/05/hardwa
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
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.
It worked just fine, and would have continued to do so, but I decided to consolidate and move my services and firewall onto my main Linux workstation. It just didn't make enough sense to maintain and power a separate box for tasks that could easily be done with spare CPU cycles.
I still have the old chip and motherboard, though - it's special to me, as it was the first CPU I worked on out of school.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
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.
Setup DOS to run on it. Get the networking card to run on it and then install the Citrix DOS client. Then point it at either a Linux box running an RDP server or some sort or point it at a Windows XP box with Remote Desktop turned on. Won't do you a lot of good without a network connection, but with one you will have the full power of your desktop system. X desktop is possible, but it's less secure (requiress SSH hacks) and is slower.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
http://www.vectorlinux.com/
Minimum Requirements: 125 MB Hard Drive, 16 MB RAM.
I had a great system about 4 years ago with the Mandrake or Redhat du jour (I can't remember which) on a P133 w/ 64MB. With KDE it was impossibly slow, but it ran great with IceWM -- better than Win98, which was also installed. It was solid as a rock, too.
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.
Windows 98 will run just as well on a 266mmx today as it did when it came out.
I have an old Acer motherboard, Pentium 166 with 64MB of RAM - and you know, back when that computer was manufactured, that was a crapload of memory, man, you could never use all that up!!!!! oh wait, windows 98 :(
Its main interest to me is that without a hard drive, the only moving part is the power supply fan. The processor just has a big heat sink. So I wonder if there's a way to use it by adding a floppy drive and possibly a USB key for extra storage - what can it do? DNS? web? Will a 1GB USB flash drive provide endless possibilities?
12:50 - press return.
I tried the following :
Pentium-233mhz 64MB
Windows XP vs. RedHat7 Gnome
I was very dissapointed with the sluggish Linux performance. WindowsXP is actually more responsive. Stories like this one are very misleading. All of you who are declaring otherwise must have some sort of tweaks and tricks. I do not see it.
Just try installing any of these on 200MB harddrive, with X and networking in working order. And preferably kernel sources + development tools to compile the kernel. Good luck.
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Strongbad's been doing just fine with his Lappy 486. I wonder what he runs on it?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This would be great if there was considerable WiFi support for Linux. This is especially true for older laptops. It just seems like if you buy an off-the-shelf WiFi card you have a 90% chance of not getting it to work consistently if you own it. It's odd because you'll find thousands of posts about how if you had just bought the v.2.9 of that same card with a S/N ending in an even number you'd have a slew of driver options thanks to a guy named Sven in Sweden who's reversed engineered that card and posted his driver on the net under the Creative Commons License. Look, the only reason to have a laptop is portability. When I had my old Toshiba, Dell, and Thinkpad laptops (MMX266's and such) I ALWAYS had to give up either Wifi, decent Video, or sound. Seems you could pick any 2.
Let the responses regarding Sven's support for every WiFi card on earth (as long as it's Oronoco) follow!
I have a stack of old boxen in my office doing reliable duty as (respectively) a NAT router / packet filter, an SMTP server, DNS server, SMTP server and SMB fileserver. They are all running OpenBSD except the fileserver which runs FreeBSD (because my SATA RAID controller shipped with a driver for FreeBSD). They all perform excellently, although Gallery is a bit slow on the webserver when doing things like resizing photos. The "fastest" one of the bunch is a Pentium II with 64 Mb RAM.
I have to totally disagree with the premise here. Windows 2000 runs *Just fine* on my K62-200
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Like many readers here, I used to run Linux on machines with much lower specs than these. I ran X (with Netscape), irc, and irc bot, an FTP site, and a web site off a Pentium 60 with 24MB memory and a 540MB hard drive, only a third of which was partitioned for Linux. Nothing has happened in the intervening decade to make this computer run less well than it ever did. You can still do all those things you used to do. Why couldn't you?
Similarly, this computer still works great with Windows NT 3.51, or Windows 95, or even DOS or Windows 3.11. As a matter of fact Windows 3.11 runs like a greased pig even on this old hardware.
As long as you choose your software carefully to match your hardware, there's no need to treat a 266MHz Pentium MMX with 64MB of memory as if it were an ancient relic. It's a perfectly good computer.
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.
OK, I've used DSL. It is OK, and small (around a 50 meg ISO). But it's based on Knoppix and is intended to be run as a Live CD, not installed onto a system. Plus DSL has not been updated in quite some time, so it's pretty old by Linux standards and is missing a lot of fixes. Still, it's GUI can be a resource hog and it demands at least as much in the way of resources as Windows. The statement Windows would have a hard time running on this low-spec laptop is just dead wrong. Sure, maybe XP would have probblems, but even Win98 would run fine (I still use a much slower 64 meg P150 with Win98 as a FTP server and as a testbed for things I don't want to trust to my main system).
I like bashing Microsoft as much as the next guy, but to suggest that DSL will run better on this system than Win98 is just wrong. And in misrepresenting both Linux and Windows this way we don't really help the Linux community, rather it make Linux advocates look more like zelots than technical experts.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
For awhile I had a lot of machines running various flavours of *BSD and *NIX, however I realized I was throwing a lot of money away keeping them on for any length of time. This isn't as much of an issue with a 486 system as it is with the early pentiums, but it's something to think about.
I keep my boxes around for routers. Toss smoothwall or openbsd on, put in some network cards, and away you go. Compactflash-IDE adapters solve the hard drive problem nicely. The linksys boxes are nice, but they don't have the flexibility, and running snort in all it's wonder is pretty cool.
With mini ITX boards down in the sub-$100 territory, requiring only RAM with everything else onboard.. and power consumption way down there.. it's much more economical and environmentally friendly to use one of those.
YMMV, of course.
..don't panic
I saw a computer a year or so ago running MS-Windows31 with Office4.something in 4MB RAM.
It was fine for what it was being used for.
Here's the kicker:
It felt as fast as a 128MB 500MHz machine running XP and Office 2000.
I wouldn't dare put that box directly onto the interweb. If there are any viruses floating about that target it, it might get sick.
The moral of the story:
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'm running a Cyrix 266 machine with 192M Ram. I'm using fairly stock Debian Sarge on it. IceWM works like a dream. I didn't have room in my office for it so it sits in my basement. I have a windows box I use for work on my desk, and I just use vnc for all my personal work.
LTSP is the way to go here.
Check out the latest ubuntu, or K12LTSP
Just spend 1K on a decent server and use the junk machines as terminals. You could use old hard drives to boot from or buy 20 dollar bootable nics from here
I've got a school running 50 terminals and the minimal maintenance on the terminals is really nice.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
Considering my church is in a high crime area, and I know that we've looked at providing Internet services for both teens and poor families, I think Linux could be a decent substitute for Win98. Firefox is simple under Linux, and the GUI is becoming more user friendly.
I agree, it isn't the best solution, but it isn't a bad one either.
BeatrIX Linux - http://www.watsky.net/
Jonathan
Mine's still working after 10 years - http://www.alphant.com/
I reccommend the Linux Terminal Server Project. You can hook up two dozen machines fit only for the trash to one competent machine and get a solid setup for little cash. Not much local disk access, but if you're just looking for an internet/email lab, it works great, and you can add in Samba to give each box a "harddrive", and printing capablity if that's needed.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I'd rephrase that. I'd say the Win9x operating systems were sufficiently ill-designed that they simply weren't ever capable of running that kind of software, while Linux, even new variants, can be configured in such a fashion that they will run on such hardware, utilizing it in a far more efficient fashion than MS ever bothered to.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I wonder what he runs on it?
My guess is SB-DOS.
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
Oh, you want to save your file to a disk?
Sure, if it was 1995. Who uses 3.5 inch floppies anymore?
Give them spam filtered email access. Or set it up to automount usb thumb drives.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
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.
WindowMaker also runs very well on slower machines. And you are right, unless you have very small (under 300MB) harddisk and under 32MB of RAM there is no need to use special Linux distros, eg. Debian Linux runs nicely on old 166MHz pentium, though I must admit that Firefox takes awhile to start up.
Older machines can be used with Windows also. For example Windows 98 on 233MHz pentium with 64MB of RAM is rather nice and allows you to play all those old classic games like Master of Magic/Orion, Ultima Underword etc (if you happen to have original Sounb Blaster 16 or Gravis Ultrasound).
- Raynet --> .
Which distribution do you use? I have an old Pentium Pro 200 that I want to use as a file server.
My Sysadmin Blog
At least in the laptop world, one problem is that many older laptops have low resolution screens. 640x480 is not comfortable anymore no matter what window manager you use.
One of these days, I'll put more effort into looking for a cheap laptop - it doesn't even need a battery, as long as it has a working display, power supply, and keyboard. I'm going to rip it apart, mount the LCD in a frame, and build it into my wall. But I see how much people want for something like a Pentium 166 laptop, and I think that they're out of their minds.
Sticking a nice 19" LCD in the wall would be even nicer, but lots more money as well.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I may take the record here: I'm running Debian on a Dell 316LT. That is a 16 MHz 386SX laptop with 8MB of RAM and a 120 MB hard drive and a 10BaseT ethernet card that I needed to grind the end off to make it fit.
It doesn't really run Linux, it is more like a walk.
yo dada21,
Ignore the trolls, what you're doing is admirable.
If you need help setting up ltsp, check out #ltsp or #k12ltsp on freenode.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
FWIW, I have a Pentium 120 with 48 megs of RAM that I have set up to dual boot Win98 and Linux. Both of them run acceptably fast. I wouldn't try running XP and Photoshop on the poor old thing, but then I wouldn't try running X, Enlightenment, and the GIMP on it, either. I have a much nicer and more recent laptop now that I got as a desktop replacement, but I still carry the old one around because it's perfectly adequate for email and word processing (Word 97), and it wouldn't be a great loss if it got stolen or dropped.
The simple fact of the matter is that, depending on what you do with them, computers became fast enough for most common tasks many years ago. The average Slashdotter feels the need for higher performance -- God knows I do -- a great deal more than the average user. Aside from games and some specialized applications, the main reason that systems continue to become larger and faster is the incestuous relationship between MS and hardware manufacturers: more machines sold mean more Windows licenses, so Windows becomes ever more resource-intensive to require new machines to be sold.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I haven't booted it in a while but I have a small Acer laptop that only had around 16 meg of memory, seems like the processor was in the 100 MHz range and it was dual boot loaded with Win9X and a pre-Fedora Red-Hat distro that was fairly stable in terms of the core LAMP software. It ran just FINE.
I used it for rapid data conversions and also for prototyping screens based on a data description format I had created. [the ddf was processed via PHP into the SQL and initial insert, update, and query templates I needed to begin the data work], and never had a down moment or had to do a Linux reboot in the several years I had the laptop in active service.
In contrast, the only useful Win9x products I used on the other partition were MS-Access 97 and the Lotus Smartsuite tools of the day (v3.1) which I used to do data conversions and translations to the MySQL data store, and the reboots on that side of the machine were frequent.
My how things don't change. I still use Linux on slightly older machines and can still do 2-3x the work without rebooting, even though M$ has had another half decade to get things right.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
I run a Dell Optiplex P2-300MHz with 512MB RAM (SDRAM PC133 x 256MB x 2) and a 10GB Hard drive.
Guess what OS I run?
WINDOWS XP PRO!
Oh my gawd?! Like, is that possible -- for sure?
yes, virginia - you can run Windows on older hardware. Don't be scared, you'll be fine.
My kids use it and love it. No problems, no pain no strain. Of course, I've upped the RAM to max (512MB) from stock (128MB) and the hard drive (from 4GB to 10GB) and popped in a nice RAGE 64MB PCI video card [alas, no AGP slots].
GUESS WHAT? It's VERY runnable. Yes, I have to defrag and I'm religious about tuning the system, but hey -- it's very very useable and I would honestly say you could put 50 of these in a computer lab in a school and get away with it.
People are just freakin used to assuming Windows requires the best of the best to run. No, folks -- it doesn't.
What you might be failing to understand is that most of what are called teen centers are not in fact lan cafes. The machines given to them would be for use by the people who run the place, organisers, planners, fund raising works, treasurer, and so on. Teen centers usually set up and sponser events for teens to attend.
Say bad words about my book, in cold oatmeal, or I shall sue!
Is this really the image we want Linux to have? I think the open source movement needs to strive to be the best. Linux has a lot to offer when compared to curent iterations of Windows, and I think that's where the focus should be.
Thank you for your time. {Leaves quietly}
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
I also use Gentoo for this purpose with distcc (I don't really use other distro's but Gentoo) the one thing I really like about working with "older" machines is that you suddenly really feel the diffrence when you compile with optimized parameters.
I have X, fluxbox and firefox (which is what I have running most of the time) running smoothly and with a speed that allows it to actually be used decently om my old Compaq Armada laptop with a 366 Mhz processer.
Watch out for thw inquisition. Giving free "damned" linux distros to churches might be a way to get promptly cremated, specially in some states.
Much as I like the idea of putting some of my old junk to good use as storage and print servers etc. It makes no economic sense at all. You can buy new computers, standalone network drives, network printer interfaces etc. for very little these days.
Frankly, I'd rather just dump the old hardware. The HDDs are probably about to burn out, the PSU is likely on it's last legs. The CPU is probably suffering from gradual heat-death. IMHO it's a false economy.
Ok - so it was an $900 computer 5 years ago - but you could replace it with a better $300 computer now.
Stretching old hardware beyond it's natural lifespan has got to be bad news.
Sure, if it was 1995. Who uses 3.5 inch floppies anymore?
Probably the same people using Pentium 233's.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Instead, why not disassemble all of your old PCs, harvest any usable parts, sell them on eBay (with no warranty, of course), and use the money to purchase a copy of VirtualPC or VMWare?
Or, if you're comfortable enough with technology to face the daunting task of configuring Linux to run on bizarre ancient hardware, why not invest your spare time into putting an ad in the paper offering basic PC hardware repair? You'll have the money for a new barebones system in weeks.
> I have is a Pentium 266 MMX laptop with 64MB of RAM. ...
> Most people would just consider this to be garbage and
> junk it,
> Windows would have a hard time running on this low-spec
> laptop...
The only computers I own are both AMD K6-2 233Mhz machines
which run Windows 98. And do so pretty well. There are a
few web sites that load a tad slow(er) but still very
peppy. One thing I would recommend to anybody who is
developing software... Run your software on older machines
such as I have. It is a lot easier to spot bottle-necks
on an older and slower machine that on your 4Ghz box. I
have come across a number of packages where it is painfully
obvious where the bottle-necks in the code are simply
because my slower machine exposes them.
FYI, don't junk your older computer, donate it. Somebody
somewhere would love to have a 266Mhz with 64MB of RAM.
For a newer Mini-ITX that runs DamnSmallLinux, check out the DamnSmallMachine.
Anyone try to revive their Tandy 1000 TL/2? I tried a few years back with Minux, but believe there was a hardware support issue, or something like that... Anyway.
Phil
I have had success with Damn small linux, feather linux, and ubuntu.
My favorite was ubuntu. I simply did a "server" install-- no gui at first. I then apt-getted X11 and ICEWM and whatever else I needed. This works fine on a old p2 laptop, 300MHz w/96 Meg of ram. I can comfortably use firefox too.
On a more powerful machine (p2 400MHz, 196M ram), I was able to use ubuntu server install with xfce.
Unfortunately, Gnome and KDE seem to hog as many resources as I throw at them.
This seems to be a perfect thread for this question.
I have an old Pentium 133 Sitting in my basement, and I want to run a SMAUG based mud off of it using Linux, however I would like the Linux distro to be as stripped as possible to allow full function of the MUD but take the least amount of space on the hard drive and memory.
I've looked at DSL and Slackware, and they seem by default to add stuff that you don't really need for a text based game, such as X windows and other unwanted programming language support. so I guess the real question is is there a distro of linux specificially designed for Mud only linux based servers?
All I really need the Linux distro to so is the following:
1) Run FTP and Telnet servers so I can add/manage the server remotely
2) Compile (C++) and Execute Smaug as well as restart Smaug if a crash occurs
3) Connect to the network so I can access Smaug as well as the FTP and telnet servers.
Also, rolling my own distro isn't really an option since I'm more a Windows user than Linux, and I know Cygnus will compile it on windows, but Windows 2000 doesn't run really great on that slow of a machine.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Everyone talking about keeping around all this ancient hardware for fun.. True, I did that too for years.. Until I moved out of my dorm and had to start paying the power bills myself. What an utter waste of money and resources! I think it would be better for the envorinment to have one fast box (and play with virtualisation if you want multiple machines), than have a battery of ancient boxes around the house. My 2 cents..
I call BS. He - writer - says Windows would have a hard time on that 266mmx+64mb ram laptop. I - and several others - have used win95 and win98 and even winme and yes, even winnt4 on lower spec machines (read 133mmx+32mb ram). So yes, I call BS on that.
That said, and me being strongly on the linux side, I couldn't agree more on the subject of linux's ability to power a system now considered by most people as useless junk, and to turn many-years-old granny machines into usable pieces of hardware. Hell, I remember how I ran Slackware on a 386dx40 with 4 megs of ram and a 850 megs Seagate hdd, and nobody who didn't see it wouldn't believe that it was useable, but it was, and it was fun. Miles better than using dos and win3.1 instead.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I got a Compaq Presario 1618 laptop in ~ 1997. It came with Win95SR.. I tried Win98SE with great results in 1999 for few years, repeatedly tried to install Debian until Sarge came out, tried DSL (dual boot with Win98), tried Win2000, tried DSL again, and now I am back to Win98SE with MSOffice XP, IE6, and Opera as default browser (Firefox also there). I was disappointed that my attempts to install Debian in 2000 were time consuming and mostly futile (even on my Desktop) and I had to go back to Windows; the dual boot stuff containing Linux were just sitting there; it was too much effort for my usual work needs to use the Linux side.
/. crowd do not like the "over friendly and paternalistic" approach of windows as an OS, as far as your babe next door (or alternatively joe average user) is concerned, the WIndows approach still seems the most successful way to reach the mass market.
From all that, I noticed that Win98SE gives me less headache, not as a system as much as the applications that I need to use. OOo and Firefox took ages to launch on the Linux part in comparison to MSOXP. Opera also ran faster with Win98SE.
I finally noticed that most of the people I work with have difficulties even with Windows systems so my attempts to suggest Linux as an alternative system were halted on the drawing board. Many people have trouble when they see a multi-boot option. Although most IT literate people like the
Just my 2 cents...
I don't get this. I consider anything that is ATX based acceptable fast. I've mostly scrapped my AT based machines, as it's quite hard to find replacement components these days.
A P266, if I remember correctly, was never produced as an AT product. Thus, for my use, it's acceptable fast.
I do have to add that I've scrapped (or are scrapping) most of my older hardware. The only reason for that, though, is power consumption. I don't see why I should use a P100 when I can have a mini-itx machine with a hell of a lot more raw power -- using the same or less watts.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
I personally like SLAX. It makes it easy to roll-your-own with SLAX modules. Check it out.
The smartest man in the whole, wide world really don't know that much. - Mose Allison
I run Linux on old hardware all the time. And every damn time I bang my head and say never again. Here's the most common problems I've run into and it makes it almost not worth the time.
CD roms that won't read burned Cds are the worst. Well, they sorta will. Just enough to frustrate the hell out of you. Getting half way through the install and then getting i/o errors. Pulling your hair as to why it won't install right. You realize it's the CD-rom. You switch to floppies. Floppies have a horrible shelf life. Don't even waste your time finding old AOL floppies to boot from. You'll pull your hair out even more than the CD roms. In reality, new floppies aren't the sort of thing sitting on every desk like 10 years ago. Some people have new ones sitting around. However, even if you do have new ones, a lot new machines don't even come with floppy drives anymore. Good luck creating your bootdisk.
Then the fun beings... the hard drive. Bad sectors hiding everywhere. They don't pop up until you've installed it and a week later wonder why postfix keeps crashing. Bad ram. An old machine is probably going to be using SD-ram. Have you seen SD-ram prices lately? It's freakin expensive. It's way more than DDR. We have some old RD-ram boxes we were going to use and those prices were more than a new computer alone. That covers moving parts. Then there's power supplies in form factors that aren't used anymore. CPU's and motherboards that haven't been produced in years. PCI video cards. Drivers. Don't even get me started...
I've had so many issues trying to work with old hardware I've just stopped trying. It's really not worth the frustration you'll go through. Old PC's with an AGP slot and popular hardware (P2 or P3 w/ Asus mobo and Voodoo card) aren't so bad. You'll generally have about 80% success rate with those which is worth a try. Weird chipsets on an old dell machine... don't even waste your time. Old laptops? Don't waste your time. Any old machine that needs more than 2 parts replaced, don't waste your time.
I'm not one just to throw money out to the wind, but I'll buy a 250 dollar new PC before wasting a week trying to get a POS to work. I've come to love mini itx machines. You can get a system as cheap as 150 bucks with new hardware fully linux compatable, a fraction the size, quiet, and super low power.
Yes, linux can run on extremely slow hardware. But does that mean we should pull every POS machine out of the garbage and try to get linux on it?
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Everyone forgets that you can run as lean or as fat as you want to under Debian. Theoretically Sarge will still work on a 386...perhaps Strongbad has Debian under the hood of his Lappy 486? The Net Install disk is smaller than Puppy, smaller even than DSL if my memory serves me right. You don't have to run GNOME or KDE with it...hell, you don't even have to run X if you really want to run lean! Try IceWM as your window manager and make sure the GTK and QT libs are installed so you can run GTK and/or KDE apps.
If you remember the trauma of the old installer and haven't tried the new debian-installer introduced with Sarge, give it a try. Ubuntu and Kubuntu use debian-installer with almost no tweaks. It's that easy.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
I ran a web site off a Macintosh LC III for 2+ years before I grew tired of the sound eminating from its ancient hard disk. It ran (runs if I power it up again) Debian just fine, and even ran PHP. The Mac LC III has a 68030 CPU running at 25Mhz, 32Mb RAM (Maxed), and a 1Gb SCSI drive. It's always amazed me what Linux will run on...
True, this machine is VERY slow - but it was also a great machine for learning Linux on. If nothing else, that old computer you have lying around can serve this purpose alone. I suggest this is in fact a better way of learning Linux than simply booting up a Ubuntu live cd on a modern PC and poking around in the GUI.
www.brownsauce.org
Well to get in on the geek-fest of old computers, I have an old Compaq Laptop, which I think is a 386 (it might be a 486), with its nice monochrome monitor (all like 8" of it) and tiny keyboard, and little rollerball. It has a hard drive that is at least a couple of hundred MBs and maybe 16 MB of memory, if I am lucky, more likely only 8 MB. I will definitely update this once I am home and can check for sure. It came with Windows 3.1 and thanks to some update disks and a PCMCIA floppy is running Windows 95 for now. I have definitely considered running linux with a minimal install and maybe a light graphical interface.
Hope I can find my serial mouse though, because that rollerball has actually seen better days. Now, I only need to find a 5.25" floppy drive to play the old DOS Batman game I have.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I don't get it, what was the PC running as its original OS? Why change?
embedded linux
I am not sure what the big deal is. I have an older copy of SuSE 7.1 that runs really well on my PII-400mhz with 128mb ram. This is my *only* computer at the moment. This same machine runs Win98 perfectly well and plays most of the games I have purchased without hiccup (most recent, though, is Diablo II Expansion).
You do not need a fast computer to run Linux. Just get an old distro and turn off the networking services. Many older machines had hardware that was reasonably well supported. You do not need WinXP or LInux 24.4.4 to have a pretty decent computing experience, though I suppose if you are a developer it is pretty useless to develop in an old version of GCC.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
While we are on the topic..
...
Anyone here work with embedded OS's?
am looking for a good chip/embedded OS combo
the basic functionality I need out of the OS is it being able to handle very basic network stuff like TCP, UDP, DHCP, DNS resolving.., be able to interact with IO's, for the chip...
am looking for something where I can program in C/C++ or Java... and cost is an issue.. would like to keep the price of the chip to 10-15 USD... any suggestions?
Cheers..
In 1993, I had a Linux system with a 40MB hard disk, 16MB RAM and an 80486-33 processor. The machine was amazing - I could recompile the kernel and the machine wouldn't even _swap_.
I ran X on it, too - using olvwm (Open Look Virtual Window Manager), and the rudimentary TCP/IP stack that Linux had in those days. I learned about Xlib programming on that computer - X, a compiler, development libraries - all fit in 40MB. Admittedly, I had about 512K left to play around with after everything I needed was installed.
You could custom make a Linux from Scratch system that wouldn't take that much more space these days (things have gotten bigger as programs and the kernel have gained features).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
How is PUPPY on an old Compaq Armada 1585DMT with only 32 MB of RAM? It is OK with its Windows 95 OSR2 OEM that it came with. I wonder if Linux would be able to run well or better with this PUPPY distribution? Or not worth it? IIRC, the HDD size is only 2 GB.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
300MHz, 800 x 600 screen, USB port. One of the best implementations of 802.11b on the planet.
You can cram in as much as 544MB RAM into one of those puppies. Mine is currently running Mac OS X Panther. And very, very happy.
Since they were designed for K-12 users, they are built hella-tough. They are also really, really hard to work on, so leave the upgrades to the experts. I got mine from my aunt and sent it to these guys to hot-rod: http://www.wegenermedia.com/ . Wegener is currently selling a whole slew of Clamshells for $279. They will probably be able to hot-rod it for you before shipping it out the door.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
systems with multiple pentium pro processors won't work well with server 2003, just FYI.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
My last laptop was a Compaq Aero - a 3.5 lb 486/25 with 16 MB RAM, 170 MB disk, 640x480 with 64 greys. The only way to install on it was by floppy, so a stack of disks for an old Slackware distro was cut. After a few months, extraneous stuff was deleted, and the result was a system with Postgres, Apache, perl, gcc, emacs running under X (fvwm2) with 70 mb of disk free for my development (so, 100 MB for the system included a 16 MB swap file). I ran PLIP for networking (ssh'ed xterms or NFS) to a desktop, and used CVS to coordinate my development projects between systems.
I still have my resulting system image... If I could spec out a replacement, it'd have flash disk, use AA batteries running at least 30 hrs per charge, and would be fanless.
My current oldest systems are 486/33's with 16 MB ram, 200 MB disk. However, even 100 of them in a cluster does not match the computes of a low end Athlon. They can be OK when dedicated to some task, like a fax server. 486's do not have CPU fans.
-- Stephen.
...well, it was a squeeze. Digital had to use a nip here and a tuck there to cram it into the very first MicroVAX.
(Heh heh heh sonny... and I had to walk to school. In the winter. Two miles. Uphill both ways...)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
its junk , just throw it in the trash.
for $200 you can go buy a shiney new low end duron or celeron.
Half a year ago, being a complete Linux newbie I actually managed to revive a 166-MHz Pentium with 32 MiB RAM. I wiped out the original Windows 98 install, because it took ages for Windows to render the windows. It was unworkable. I gave the penguin a try, since noone wanted to work with this box. After some forum searches, I stumbled upon Slackware. Works as a dream if you just minimally install the system, leaving out X-Windows and the Windows managers. Now I have a nice and fast Apache/PHP webserver with 1.8 GiB of webspace, all for free. Occasonally, I even use Lynx to get the latest news when other computers are in use by collegues.
Just out of curiousity. Is there a Linux distro with a reasonably usable X-Windows environment for a 166 MHz Pentium/32MiB RAM configuration?
running Red Hat 6.2. It's a Compaq Prolinea MT, which I got for free (company was scrapping old PCs), and Linux has made it useful (well, useful in that it's a server for an IRC bot I wrote in Java :) ...yes, Java is running 24x7 on this machine!). The nice thing is that Linux works flawlessly with all the old hardware in this machine, which uses very little power and is very quiet.
I've also had Linux make good use out of some really old Sun boxes. I setup an ancient SPARC IPX as a print server and an LX as an internal web server, both running RH 6.1 for SPARC.
I just think that there is so much waste with computers. I've found working PIII machines in my apartment complex's dumpster several times. It's good to put these to good use, and with Linux they can be given small but useful tasks.
Didn't know anything about DSL till this article, but I just set up a P266MMX/160MB laptop with Debian stable. Haven't installed an X server, but so far the install has gone flawlessly (although the installer froze when I tried to use the default 2.4 kernel--cured by using the 2.6 kernel). It runs XMMS quite happily.
P226MMX? You call that old? I've been running Debian on a P75 with 32MB memory for the last four and half years. It's my server! I host my domain on my DSL line and this server provides to the internet my web site, email, ssh, and occasional FTP. Locally it provides DNS caching, NNTP (via LeafNode) and SNMP+MRTG monitoring of my network. The only thing I really have a beef with is LeafNode, which takes ages to respond to the first request it receives in a while. Other than that it works just fine for me.
WHat do you meand "new life". Computers don't slow down as they age. Whatever the computer did backl when it was new it can still do today. I have a 144Mhz Penitum notebook with 80MB RAM. I installed Linux on this machine the first day I owned it. I never even booted Windows even once. The PC worked well then and continues to work well today. I used the machine for software development which means running four copies of a terminal emulator. The computer still performs the functions it did when new just as well now as then. But the problem is that now days people do different things with thier PCs than they did 10 years ago. Today I want a notebok that will alow me to edit my digital photos and even my video from my mini DV camera. No matter what software I load on the 144Mhz Pentium it is marginal at editing muli-megapixel images and usless at video. For that use even a low-end Apple iBook blows it away. But I agree with the parrent. Basically it says "If you have a 1990's vintage PC, it wil still perform quite well if you go and get some 1990's vintage software for it.
Blueflops, 2 floppies, that's it, net connection, graphical web browsing, irc, etc. Outstanding, I run it on an old toshiba lappy with 16 megs ram and a floppy drive.
Austrumi 50 megs of coolness and no more. It does need more RAM though than a lot of other small distros, 128, but it loads into the RAM then, spits the CD back out freeing up the optical drive, and is wicked fast.
Don't forget about BeOS. AFAIK it'll run on a Pentium with 16 MB of RAM although Firefox probably wouldn't work. On slightly better hardware you can even watch fullscreen XviD video. The best thing is that BeOS's GUI is freakishly fast. On my machine (3 GHz P4) it's at least twice as fast as Linux or Windows, so I'd bet the difference would be even more apparent on older machines.
Your "oldest computers" sounds just like the one I am using right now, except that I doubled ram and CPU speed already.
I just managed to sell a 66Mhz to someone, wake me up when you got an OS for that puppy.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I still use a Pentium 233 running PC-DOS 7.0 and WFW 3.11. Why? Because there are a lot of great, older games, like Magic Carpet that do not run on modern systems. This is because either emulation does not work properly or the game did not have proper clock timing and cannot run properly on fast systems. But a native DOS/Windows environment running a CPU slowdown utility works incredibly well. (The geek in me also installed the WFW 3.11 TCP/IP stack. So, I can surf the Net with Netscape 4.07 on my broadband connection.) Laugh all that you want, but WFW on a 233 MHz system is incredibly fast. :)
I've sold dozens of old PCs ranging anywhere from 400 MHz Celerons to 866 MHz Pentium IIIs, all of them verified to run Linux without problems. In this case, I used SimplyMEPIS to determine compatibility. But when I needed to change hardware (which was very, VERY rare) in order to make Linux recognize all of the hardware, the system would sell every time even without a keyboard and mouse. (I could only get the PC itself.)
The one thing that I found as a constant among all of those systems is that 256 MB of RAM is what really made the difference between a lot of virtual memory paging and a relatively idle system. As long as the system had 256 MB, Linux ran great regardless of whether it was a 400 MHz Celeron or (more recently) a 1.2 GHz Celeron.
By far, the most common response from people who bought these systems was a "thank you" for offering such systems because they wanted to play with Linux, but didn't want to "risk" one of their existing systems. Having an inexpensive, older system that runs Linux (and runs it well) was exactly what they were looking for. (I know, I know, they could have always downloaded a live CD distro themselves, but we who are not afraid to take such initial steps are in the vast minority.)
It all comes down to a phrase that I've been using for years: No computer is truly obsolete until you no longer have use for it. As long as older PCs can do whatever people need it to do, there will always be people who want to "breathe life" into older computer.
Hell, even an old Sun SPARCstation LX running at 50 MHz was a great broadband PPPoE-dial-up/firewall for me for several months before I finally got an actual router.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
I have a Gateway Solo 2500 laptop.
;-)
64 Mb RAM, 300MHz pII Celeron, 4 gig hd.
It's running Debian Stable "Sarge" with the 2.6 kernel.
I know DSL would run faster, but it's 2.4 kernel and NdisWrapper version won't work correctly with my cheepo five buck special WiFi card.
After some expermentation, I've come up with these apps for daily desktop use:
IceWM - desktop environment (95% of the themes are ugly and it has a very bad default config, but it's pretty usable after tweaking.)
Opera - browser/email client
Rox Filer - file manager
AbiWord - word processor
AYTTM - IM client
ZSNES - games
Dillo - quick browser
mtPaint - Basic image manipulation
feh - slideshows/image viewer
aterm - lightweight terminal
xtdesk - desktop icons
mist - not an app, but a very responsive gtk theme. It really seems to make a difference.
People might laugh that it takes 18 seconds for my web browser to appear, but I use this as my main computer. It works fine, dispite the fact everyone in #linux laughs at it whenever I try to get suggestions for speeding things up. It's great for a poor student.
Mod parent up as insightful please.
I have installed OpenBSD on more 486s and p90s than I can remember, perfect as a firewall for securing your home network.
Reality has a notoriously liberal bias -- Stephen Colbert
Thanks for the tip. I'll put it to use just as soon as you buy me a copy of it.
My Sysadmin Blog
Try out using the Linux Terminal Server Project. I have been overwhelmed with the efficiency of this system. I've had old P100's with 32Mb ram working with no problems. My users never complain of speed issues. In fact one is using an old Dell Optiplex 233 with 64Mb ram that for her Firefox, Thunderbird and Openoffice needs is faster than the cronky old Win 98 P100 with 90 Mb ram. Make sure you have a decent 100mb network card or it will all feel like treacle. Check out www.ltsp.org, k12ltsp and Edubuntu also! The LTSP guys have done an amazing job. It was not the hardest admin job I have done with Linux to get it running. (Migrating the user to Linux was done by stealth too... first change the apps to FLOSS then change the OS! I'm working on the rest of them...)
My home server (see URL in profile) is an old HP Pavilion 3100 running Slackware 10.1. Added a 20GB drive and a cheap PCI network card and it runs Apache/ProFTPd great. No GUI, if I did, it would be used as a secondary IM/browsing machine...which is bad, because the netcard is so cheap the NT3/4 drivers are broken and it seems to lock up with every graphical browser I throw at it.
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
My worry with this sort of layout in a home usage is power consumption. I mean, how much wattage are we talking about per box? These days, it might be better to go with a slightly beefier box and have it wear a few more hats.
With Gentoo I compiled and installed only what I need. It runs well as a basic Internet browsing, email checking machine running under Gnome. The bootup is far, far snappier than it was running Fedora Core (!!), as in seconds vs minutes.
What?
You could just put an older version of Windows on it. Windows 98 is a good and proven OS (I know people who still use it in favor of XP) that'll run on just about anything. Nothing against Linux, it's just that some of us still prefer Windows, and Linux isn't the only operating system you can put on an old computer. I've still got an old AMD 350MHz running 98 that works great.
Remember kids, tin foil doesn't work, so use LeadHat.
I have a Compaq Proliant 2500 (PPro/200 with 64MB) running Win2k SP4, and it's just fine for web surfing using Firefix 1.0.7 or Opera 8.5 and also just fine for doing light application work.
If I try to do too much it'll slow down a bit, but as long as I keep things to only a few applications it's just as fast as Win95 was (the idea is to keep swapping down).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I have it running on a handful of PPros, mainly for use as a fileserver (ext3fs+Samba), but also sometimes as a desktop distro. It comes with a decent version of Webmin as well as VNC for remote administration, and the version of KDE it comes bundled with (2.2) will run relatively well on a PPro with 64MB.
FWIW...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Why would you want to use samba to give linux machines access to linux servers? Use NFS or AFS for network file storage, and *gasp* lpd for printing.
I have used my Pentium 166MHz with 64MB RAM running Apache and FileZilla Server on Windows 98SE which worked alright.
I found Windows 2000 worked just fine on my Toshiba Libretto, with a 133/266 Mhz Pentium (no MMX) and 64M of RAM. It was the growth in applications that made it gradually less attractive and made me spend more time using FreeBSD with a lightweight window manager instead of Windows before a leaky air conditioner finally washed it out... newer applications that I needed to switch to Windows for wouldn't run comfortably on the computer.
Office applications, whether OpenOffice or Microsoft Office, are just too bloated. The OS you're running is less of an issue when they come into the picture.
Whatever it is, he's definitely all geek, and old-school at that - CLI all the way, no X or any other windowing system for him. He doesn't even use pine, it looks like something more like good old "mail" Maybe he's running some variant of CPM? :)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Disclaimer, I'm not a gamer. All I do with my systems is write software, edit occasional graphics, remotely administer other systems, and the other typical stuff.
:iptables firewall, runs CentOS
:file server, media server, runs CentOS. Just brought online this weekend to replace a dual PII machine (IDE drive interface was getting erratic)
Currently in use in my home/office:
Pentium Pro 200, 128MB RAM
386SX25, 8MB RAM (notebook) : portable console for accessing switch/router serial interfaces (using minicom), runs some ancient version of Slackware (one of those massive floppy installs)
Pentium III 350, 256MB RAM
Pentium III 800 (dual), 1GB RAM: my primary workstation, runs Win XP Pro.
All of my systems except the notebook are retired servers. I really hate wasting good equipment.
Okay, so I picked it out of the garbage, however, I was able to get it up and running with Damn Small Linux 1.5.
It wasn't an easy task, but it can limp along running GAIM and FireFox when the wife is on the newer computer (newer being six years old instead of eleven).
The two things that took a while to figure out were getting the video card to display more than sixteen colours and getting the mouse to work. It turned out the latter problem was hardware, and a donated I/O card did the trick there.
I didn't try Puppy on that particular box, however, I've used it elsewhere and find it great for hooking up in a pinch.
--- Dan
The latest version of Slackware is still compiled for i486; it runs fine. If you need a GUI, you'll need a bigger hard drive and more RAM, but I find Slackware a perfect distro for headless servers.
I imagine 486 support will be dropped from a future release (just as 386 support already has been), but people are talking about Pentiums as being too old to be usable; I'm sure Slackware will continue to support them for quite awhile.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I have a compaq Presario CDS 520 which runs Slackware 1.1.2. The kernel was recompiled, and I use umsdos to put linux and DOS all on the same partition, due to the impossibilty to partition resizing (no software will run on the machine that does that, and the hard drive cannot be removed because it's welded in, somehow)
I have recently upgraded several programs on it, 'less' pager from 187 to 385, GNU make from 3.70 to 3.80 (9 years of diffrent and look how little the version number changed, it's like that for a LOT of GNU software, and no I am not insulting GNU, just stating the publically available facts). It runs kernel 0.99.15, and I actually ran a little ELF test demo on it. Yes, it run ELF binaries, of course not really. Only statically linked ones or specially hacked ones that work if a.out so's are used.
The machine itself uses a 486SX2 CPU, which means I have to use kernel math emulation. Can't keep the current CPU and install a 487, no slot for a 487 (unless the 487 is on a ISA expansion card). The sound blaster works in Linux, however, the odd Mac-like volume buttons on the front of the unit don't. That should be easy, however, as they only use IRQ 15.
The 486 also runs DOS and WFW3.11 (an upgrade from regular Windows 3.1, mainly for the networking, which doesn't work because the the ethernet card that was in there stopped working besides just identifying itself to ISAPNP). I also use LOADLIN to boot the kernel, because it's faster than the floppy disk option. Overall, the machine provides hours of entertainment and hackability (not cracking, hacking in the original "clever programing" sense). It's nice, and the builtin monitor/video support 1024x768 (but only at 16 colors). But to be honest, the machine itself looks like an old m68k mac (Performa 530 or so) where the speakers, mic, monitor, and volume buttons were all builtin to the unit. Additionally, it is more architexturally closer to a laptop from 1994 than a PC, due to it's APM/powersaving and volume buttons. However, it works, it has many years ahead, and might make a good shoutcast client (if i get an ethernet card and a mp3 player working). It's low speed wouldn't affect mp3 playback, because internet streams are of low quality to begin with, so no need to cut the quality for speed.
Anyone that coul provide an a.out or static ELF mpg[123/321] binary would be given much thanks.
(Note: If you google the unit's name verbatim under image search, you will find a whopping 2 images.)
Shameless plug: Use AstLinux to create a PBX. AstLinux has been submitted to Slashdot a few times, but has never made it to the front page.
PBX - built around Asterisk, The Open Source PBX
Small - 26mb including Asterisk, mini_httpd, openssh, openssl, ntp, PHP, various other daemons.
Flexible - Custom init system, development tarball available.
Portable - runs on x86, ppc, ARM/xscale (and probably MIPS)
And of course it's free (speech/beer).
Check it out!
http://www.astlinux.org/
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 had one of those (P100) for a while, but I figured it was burning $50/year of electricity and it was noisy. I also had a lan hub which used a few more watts. I was thinking of going to a 486 (no cpu fan and less power consumption) but then I found a wireless router on sale for $18.
Dr. Frankenstien also breathed life into old hardware using lots of electricity.
You know, those kinds of server apps that you were talking about could just as easily be run on Windows 98 if you wanted - they are not actually part of the Linux kernel!
We have a couple of old application servers running in our office running Windows 98 on Pentium 150 with 32MB. We occasionally think that we should upgrade them but they just keep working, so why bother making more work for ourselves. They will get phased out in the next round of server upgrades that we do, but only to consolidate our boxes and not because the underlying OS in incapable of doing the job.
The biggest problem I have had with the various light distros is the lack of a decent low-weight web browser.
Firefox is huge, it will not run reasonably without a fast machine with lots of RAM.
Dillo is small and fast, and has potential, but lacks what most people would consider minimal capability... I don't mean to put it down, but it doesn't render almost any site correctly. Forget about sites with AJAX, I don't think it even has CSS and it doesn't even support https out of the box.
I find it quite surprising that more effort has not been made to create a decent low-weight browser, given the vast number of older machines out there that could be made into useful web-browsing stations if such a product existed. I am sure it would be most welcome by the many people who only want a web browser and don't need much else.
What the hell is this plant pot talking about? 64MB and a P2 were GOOD SPECS for a Windows 98SE system. Win98SE with 64MB flew. Moreover, you didn't have to suffer a crap UI either like Damn Small Linux has. In my opinion, all Damn Small Linux proves is how shit Linux is on low spec machines unless you don't mind having an extremely basic UI.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
Still running as a wireless network bridge with freebsd. I am sure it could run debian or something pretty well.
Microsoft aggravates my tourettes syndrome.
Surely you meant 'teh Inquisition'
It would be cool if we could develop some type of Sourceforge or Sourceforge-type of sites to help people exchange hardware locally, so as to avoid the cost of shipping. There is already Craigs List and Freecycle, two that I can think of currently, but nothing dedicated solely to computers, like SourceForge is for software.
I mean, imagine what a SourceForge for older harware could do for schools, non-profits, etc.
Anyone who has ideas on this could email me at einfeldt at gmail dot com.
I have started a website at DIYparts.org to do just that, and would appreciate any tips as to someone else that is doing it better, so that we could either just quite DIYparts.org and join them, or improve DIYparts.org where that other site is lacking.
We are going to start offering videos for free to download to give newbies an idea how to start with GNU/Linux. The DIYparts.org site is here:
http://www.diyparts.org/
Have people forgotten how we used to use these 'old' computers? I recall DOS and Win 3.1.1 as quite a useful and reliable combination. I had a word processor, a web browser (dial up of course, Netcom as I recall) and quite a few games which ran just fine on my 486-DX66. I know many peple who still run DOS and are very content for their needs (usually typing up memos or invoicing customers). Let us not forget, that not everyone needs to be 'connected' or have 1GHz+ of processing power to print greeting cards for the grand kids.
I'm not sure Linux *is* the right choice for breathing new life (do they need new life?) into these systems. Why not just use an OS which was in use on these systems when they were new (I guess you could argue Slackware Linux was around back then too). Most of what we use today has existed in one form or another since 1994 (web etc.), so why the new OS?
Runs qpsmtpd (spamassassin, clamd etc.) to host my email, bincimap to serve it up, samba for the storage for Windows machines, etc.
...
Sits behind a hardware firewall so it doesn't do firewall duty, but it runs SSH and I connect several sessions to it from work (get round the nanny proxy server).
Runs Gentoo nicely with 80Mb RAM and a 6Gb drive. I've run X and even KDE on it, but mostly it's just a server, so runs console mode only most of the time.
Oh, and it has no fans (the hard drive is the loudest component) and only draws 8 watts according to my meter - makes Mini-ITX systems look powerful but power hungry.
One thing if you're going to use old laptops for servers - check the cooling vents, they weren't always intended for 24x7 operation - I removed half the casing from mine
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Simply put, I don't think you can create a stable server platform out of any of the Win9x releases, but clearly it isn't the fault of that hardware, because I have first hand experience getting Linux mail servers and routers on less-than-300mhz hardware.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I ran Slackware Linux w/ 1.0.7 kernel on a pentium 90 w/ 64MB RAM 10+ years ago with 48 analog MODEMS plugged into it through cyclades boards. Currently, I have a P60 w/ CMD460 bug AND Pentium F00F bug, 40M RAM running the latest FreeBSD stable. It has been online 24/7 since October 2000. I tried to run Linux on it but none of the distros (at the time) would allow you to install unless you installed more memory. I dont see how this got slashdotted. Old news.. DSL has been out for a while now.. I wish that DSL put dates in their change log.
PXES is pretty much what you need. I've used it to boot right into NX client. Works great.
http://www.2x.com/pxes/
Mucous membranes are the part of your brain that, like, make you think about mucous. --Beavis
My old SONY Vaio (P200mmx) runs the Windows 98 it came with, perfectly fine... Why would I want to put Damn Small Linux or some other Linux Distro on it?? This is another silly article... Old hardware runs the OS it came with fine. It ran it fine then, it will run it fine now...
In my opinion, software is not the problem. There are two other significant disadvantages in using old computers. Old computers have almost always old noisy fans which need to be replaced. Moreover, a 15" CRT display, six years old, is probably not very satisfactory, compared to a recent LCD panel. Keyboards are ugly and the mouse is full of dirt.
This box is running Mandrake GNU/Linux 2.6.8 with WindowMaker, P2/233Mhz. However the machine is now (after 8 years loving upgrades :) totally pimped up with three HDs (a whopping 40Gb) and 320Mb RAM. I've also upgraded to a Matrox videocard, circa 1999. Firefox 1.5 runs fine, xscreensaver makes Windows users jealous, and all is well in the world. The only thing I can't run on it is SETI@home, cos the new Boing! crap refuses to install on anything older than a couple of years. I suppose I understand why, but it's still bloody annoying to have those hard-won units & my account zapped.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
LTSP does look pretty close to what I was talking about, it is a pity though that it won't work for your architecture. I'll have to read into their docs/wiki a little and see if it does what I'm hoping for. The Achilles heel of many projects that I've checked out is that they're very insecure: not only is the x-windows client/server communication unencrypted, but it requires a large number of ports left open on the client machines in some cases. Although I understand that a lot of people are going to use these on internal/dedicated subnets and behind firewalls, it just seems like a dangerous practice in general to build a system without regard to security these days. (Suppose you want to use one client wirelessly, and your wifi hub is located outside your firewall?) Hopefully LTSP isn't like that.
The OpenMosix system is something I was not aware of at all -- at least not in the way they're using it. (In short they're taking a thin-client/server combination and using it as a cluster, so that it "load balances" computationally across the various machines. Pretty slick, if it works.)
Anyway, thanks for the link.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I am running FreeBSD 6.0 on a P200 sony with fluxbox and a light load of standard apps. My only complaint is Firefox load time, all other apps load and run great.
Pentium 266 MMX laptop with 64MB of RAM.
My laptop is 166 MMX with 48MB RAM, of which 16 MB is partially broken. I run gentoo on it, as well as I do on my pretty fast and fat desktop and servers.
There you are, staring at me again.
My friend gave me a Pentium 1, 100MHz, 32MB RAM, no hard disk.
I put my CD-ROM on it, with a costumized boot CD that loads X, and runs the desktop and applications from my machine (that has power enough to run apps for two users at once).
You can use it as a terminal for a Windows machine too, with rdesktop.
On a Toshiba Satellite PII 233. This was my main machine during 2003-2004. I found it in a skip outside a design firm, and after a little bit of playing around (including adding a 20GB HDD from a dell laptop in the same skip) I had site set up in a way that made it perfectly useable for everyday tasks such as email, web, and office stuff... I beat the crap out of it and it just kept running. I finally passed it on to a friend who is (as far as I know) still using it today.
[All Your Fish Are Belong To Us]
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!
That may be old-spec for desktop/productivity use, but it's about on par for an embedded system, i.e. a router or other network appliance. That's something you shouldn't overlook.
I currently run my intranet network server on a HP 800 with 96MB RAM - dhcp, named, log server, nessus, etc. It runs NetBSD of course!
IMHO notebooks make ideal appliances of this sort.
They are cheap if you buy right, they draw little power (good for always-on 24/7 budget), then often have power-saving CPU/etc features (often you can turn off ports that are not needed), a built-in UPS (the notebook battery), easily-swappable drives (most notebook drive bays are easy to access/swapout), small form-factor, and a built-in compact-console. You can even kensington lock-it to a water pipe to prevent theft.
They're also a great learning experience - get to know what it's like and the real issues of rolling up your own appliance.
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 ... I figured I would see what I could salvage out of this dinosaur.
Ouch.. hey stop hammering the stakes in!
Windows would have a hard time running on this low-spec laptop
Hey, my work PC is a P2-266 MMX. It runs windows 2000 just fine, and I compile C++ with it, and even run Firefox (which uses more resources than the compiler).
Windows 95 ran great on a 486-66 with 16Mb RAM. I knew a guy who had a 486SX-25 laptop with and 8Mb ram. *That* laptop did have a hard time running Windows.
I remember when we built the first student-run computer to be placed on WMU's network. We put together a 486/133 with 16Megs of RAM and installed Slackware running the 1.0 kernel and X windows.
We spend a whole afternoon of testing, trying to get it to swap. The only way we could get it to was to have gnuchess play against itself. When you do that, it forks itself, and thus has two active 9Meg processes.
These days, you get swap death with 64Meg of RAM because of all the bloat that has crept into the newer kernels (and everything else).
I used to run Windows 2000 on my HP Vectra P166 with 32MB of RAM, 2MB S3 integrated video, and dual 1GB 5400 RPM hard drives, which I configured as a software RAID-0 array.
:-)
The reason I didn't reach the point of diminishing returns with that box is simply that I had no money. I paid for it (approx. $150 on eBay) by selling some old software, also on eBay. Hard to imagine trying to deal with that now that I'm on a 2GB Athlon64 running Gentoo...
That's the end of my little story.
In most of the world a Pentium 266 is still a very usefull computer. Go anywhere that has a culture of internet cafes and you will see heaps of such computers...
0..4(86) is getting oldddddddd.....
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
Unless you're playing games your wasting your money.
I ran Debian for a couple of years on a Compaq 386/20 with 10MB RAM and 100MB HD. My spare laptop is one of those 486 butterfly Thinkpads with Debian 2.2, still runs great with IceWM and Netscape.
My current laptop is a PII 233 with 128MB RAM running Debian Sarge. Using IceWM and launch from xterm, works great but a little sluggish with Firefox. Hopefully FF1.5 will make it happy.
Current desktop is 433MHz Celeron with 392MB RAM, 300GB disk which is basically the same system I built six years ago with 32MB RAM and 1GB disk originally, and been incrementally upgrading. It works solid and hasn't missed a beat bar a couple of DeathStar drives taking a dive.
Does everything (barely), but good enough.
POKE 36879,8
... other smaller and more efficient OS's like AROS (a Free OS and clone of the Amiga OS)
I have more than a dozen computers that are lower than 400MHz. I have several laptops that are around 266MHz, several computers anywhere between 133MHz and 400MHz, and maybe a few around 700MHz. Just the other day, I had the hardest time throwing out my 2nd computer, which was an AST Advantage 614! with a 100MHz Pentium, and 8MB of RAM. I just sat and stared at it for the longest time. I didn't want to let go, but I had to. But I still think to myself, "That's still a good machine. I mean, its a freakin' Pentium!" I can't get rid of these old machines because I still find them "powerful." Running DSL on it would be a great idea. However, I personally couldn't use all those computers, and don't want to pay the electric bill for running them all, unless I was making money with them. But my point is, just because it's not in the "GHz" range, that doesn't mean it isn't still a good machine. Hello, I still think my Cyrix is a good chip. It was blazingly fast for me.
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
Grinding your NIC down, that's great.
My "low end" box is a Mac SE/30 running NetBSD (of course!). It's about as low-end as you can get in the Mac world and still run Unix. (Yeah, some other models are also 16 MHz but a bit slower because of other design issues, and there is one 68020 machine.) It's the most expandable of the bottom-end Macs, which is why I chose it - mine has 80MB and a 9GB drive, and I've heard of larger.
Why do this? Because I can. It's a rock solid little box, and performs its tasks very well.
Constitutionally Correct
:) a pair of slax... regular and kill bill editions /:)
Slax works great on a lot of hardware, and dsl does good also. You may want to check College Linux. the install is older but it being slack based you can connect slapt-get to the current release and get all updated.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Try out Thinstation
I at one stage had it running on a NetVista 2800, using it as a thin client to remote into various other machines.
Worked great, except for the 60Hz refresh rate making my eyes bleed.
with so many posts on the older pc's still running around, I thought i'd add my contribution..
Mine is a 486DX2 @66MHz, with 8MB RAM and a 1GB HDD.
It still manages to run Win95 (though really slowly compared to my current desktop)
My current desktop is a PIII@600MHz with 192MB RAM, and
2x 40GB HDD.
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.
Sorry, but it was only last fall that I upgraded our systems from 233MHz AMDs, w/ 192M RAM. Both had been running RH 9 (though I far prefer IceWM to KDE). The only thing that was *REALLY* *SLOW* was, of course, OpenOffice.
Meanwhile, my Pentium 120MHz, w/ no X, is a perfectly good firewall/router....
mark
No, SoHo is the heavyweight (modern) version. The Deluxe version is the lightweight desktop with all of the serving tools and packages that you'd want on your legacy box. That's the problem - 5.1 is desktop only, 5.1 SOHO is heavyweight, and 5.1 Deluxe is desktop with access a decent set of packages.
The parents are morons. I can run Win 95 perfectly fine on my old Pentium 166, 16MB RAM and a 4GB hard drive.