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 While this laptop might seem old and out-of-date now, it is small and light.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.""

Comments

Get the PUPPY!

[TripMaster Monkey]

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. ^_^

Re:Get the PUPPY!

[TubeSteak]

Yea, I know what you mean.

My old hardware can't handle Windows 3.1

This Linux thing sounds interesting

Re:Get the PUPPY!

[hey!]

I like it too, but each has its place.

Puppy is designed to be small, attractive and usable. A normal person might chafe slightly at not having his favorite application represented, but most day to day things will be adequately supported.

DSL is designd to be small as possible, no trade-offs or nods towards sanity at all. A normal person will want to gouge his eyeballs out with a ball point pen after using it for any length of time.

I'd say if you can run Puppy rather than DSL, do it. But DSL serves an important purpose when even Puppy is too big.

Re:Get the PUPPY!

[Pxtl]

Good call. People always push DSL as the "legacy box" linux distro - but that's not the best approach. First, DSL is focussed on small _size_ more than anything else. A new HDD is the easiest upgrade to do on a legacy box - at the vary least you can get it up to the 8Gig limit. Meanwhile, ease-of-use and functionality go out the window.

Vector Linux is supposed to be the best for this, but it's a retail product - their free versions are full-featured modern distros a la Ubuntu, not lightweights. There's Buffalo, which is a free rerelease of Vector, but it is a small project.

One recommendation I heard for saving an old box was to go with 'Drake. I know it sounds odd, but remember that Mandrake comes with lightweight WMs. Theoretically if you rip out enough extraneous stuff and boot X into Ice, you might go far that way.

Remember: your competition is Win98 + Office2k. Win98 might've been unstable and outright dangerous, but it was lightyears ahead of DSL for ease-of-use and functionality.

Of course, if you're one of those command line cowboys, then my comments are pointless, but so is this whole article - you don't need DSL or anything else, you can just hack your Gentoo in to fit the box.

Hardly; they're great for VPN

[mekkab]

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.

Re:Hardly; they're great for VPN

[Otter]

Yeah, people talk about old Pentiums like they're cuneiform tablets. What do they think ran on the Pentium 266 originally, DOS?

It will run Win98 happily, or (with a bit of extra RAM, perhaps) any Linux distribution with the services turned off should be fine, if you use WindowMaker or Fluxbox. You don't need to mess with boutique Linuxes for something like this. (Personally, I'd just throw on Red Hat 5.2..)

Re:Hardly; they're great for VPN

[rbochan]

Not just for VPN. I use older hardware every single day.

I've been in the process of doing a writeup that I'll be submitting to the Debian Administration website.
The laptop I have is an old Dell Latitude CP M233XT circa 1997. It's got a Pentium II 233 MHz processor, 128 meg ram, and the original 3G drive is now a 4.1G hard drive swapped out from a dead HP Omnibook 4100.

I won't rehash the entire article in this post, but suffice it to say, it's the laptop that I use for my business every day. It runs Debian (Sarge) and a customized KDE setup. No complaints as far as usability goes. Things take a bit longer to start up than on my P-III 850 at home, but it's nothing I can't deal with. OpenOffice.org is the real pig on the machine, but that's to be expected.

Re:Hardly; they're great for VPN

[Reziac]

My #2 everyday machine is a lowly P233/128mb RAM; it has Win95 and an assload of large apps (Corel Office 8, CorelDraw 8, Photoshop 5.5, assorted internet apps, etc.) It runs well even with heavy multitasking, works fine for everything expected of it, and *never* crashes. You couldn't pry this machine outta my hands with a crowbar. :) -- At one time it had RH6 on it, and KDE was usable (tho sluggish) but Gnome was like watching paint dry :(

The oldest machine here that still has a Real Job is a P120/64mb/Win95 in a luggable case, mainly used to leech off a friend's cable modem. It's perfectly competent for that simple task.

I've just rehabbed a stack of P150/32mb/Win95 boxen, to give to a teacher who has no funds for PCs in her classrooms. They're good enough for the simple apps she uses there.

There's no reason one HAS to install the latest and greatest on every machine. Let old systems run the stuff that was current in their day (whether Windows, linux, or whatever), and remain both useful and performing adequately to their tasks. Every job doesn't need a P4-3GHz screamer.

Hell, for years I did all my internet stuff on a 486... after all, a dialup machine doesn't need to be any faster than the modem!

Really nice for old hardware

[nizo]

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).

Re:Really nice for old hardware

[Kadin2048]

I've thought the same thing. I find it hard to believe that somebody, somewhere, hasn't already done it -- it seems like an obvious step to take if you wanted to run a bunch of thin clients without much disk storage.

For everything you hear about using old hardware as thin x-server clients to run applications remotely (which comes up pretty often here on /.) there aren't -- at least to my knowledge -- very many easy to use distros that let you do it out of the box. If somebody can prove me wrong on this I'd be pleased, since I've always been interested in playing around with thin-client stuff, but it's seemed rather daunting to get into.

If somebody felt like putting together a bootable distro, suitable for low-end or old hardware, that would fit on a business-card CD or inexpensive USB flash drive, and do nothing but let the machine work as an x-server over a secure connection and run remote applications, I think there's a definite demand for it (especially if it had a matching "thick" server/x-client distro).

Damn Small Linux

[carcosa30]

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.

A long awaited distro

[dada21]

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).

Makes a great C64 hard drive

[mccalli]

The oldest computer I have is a Pentium 266 MMX laptop with 64MB of RAM

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

NetBSD werks just fine!

[zaft]

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.

Re:I'm Not Cutting Edge But...

[dada21]

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.

List of tiny Linux distributions

[Ricardo Dias Marques]

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: Tiny
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Syste ms/Linux/Distributions/Tiny/

Slashdotted

[Krast0r]

Site seems to be down - or at least running slow. Here is the Coral Cache link:

http://www.aselabs.com.nyud.net:8090/

jealous, dammit!

[Namronorman]

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.

Re:You mean I can run linux on old hardware?

[MightyMartian]

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.

Vector

[RailGunner]

Based on slackware, optimized for older hardware, and there's also a SOHO edition with KDE (standard edition has IceWM or Fluxbox, but SOHO is heavier...).

http://www.vectorlinux.com/

Minimum Requirements: 125 MB Hard Drive, 16 MB RAM.

Old laptops

[jav1231]

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!

Re:Old laptops

[Neph]

You're correct that native Linux support for WiFi NICs is limited, but fortunately, you don't need native support if the laptop is ix86. ndiswrapper will allow your Linux kernel to use a Windows driver for virtually any NIC you care to name. I use it myself for a card with a Broadcom chipset, works like a charm.

Get the PUPPY? I AM the PUPPY!

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Re:I'm Not Cutting Edge But...

[SatanicPuppy]

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.

Laptop screens

[RevMike]

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.

Re:Older Computers == Unreliable Computers

[Chris Tyler]

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.