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 While this laptop might seem old and out-of-date now, it is small and light.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

[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.

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).

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.

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/

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: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.

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.

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.

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!