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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 While this laptop might seem old and out-of-date now, it is small and light.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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
Of course not; trying to make older computers perform as well as modern ones at tasks suited to the modern ones is ridiculous. The point, as I understand it, is to recognize which tasks older machines can perform well and avoid wasting resources by letting them handle those tasks.
A laptop that's intended to be used solely for non-graphical word-processing (obviously for a fancy document you'll want more resources) doesn't need blazing specs to be able to run vi or nano. A machine intended to be a home fileserver doesn't have to run a desktop.
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
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 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 --> .
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.
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.
Watch out for thw inquisition. Giving free "damned" linux distros to churches might be a way to get promptly cremated, specially in some states.
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 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.
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.
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 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.