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Linux On Older Hardware
Joe Barr writes "Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier has put together a substantive report on how well Linux runs on older hardware. Are you surprised to learn that the belch of smoke and FUD out of Redmond on the topic last month isn't true? As Zonker shows, 'The bottom line: Linux is still quite suitable for older hardware. It might not turn your aging PC into a powerhouse, but it will extend its lifespan considerably.' NewsForge, like Slashdot, is part of OSTG."
http://slashdot.org/~Zonker ?
Or is Zonk just greenlighting stories he wrote?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Do us a favour: post the link to TFA at linux.com, not just the link to a single paragraph at "News"forge.
Call me old fashioned, but I like a dump to be as memorable as it is devastating - Bender
I think it is riduculous that the article link takes you to another OSTG page which displays no more information than the article summary. Here's a direct link to the story http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/02/13/18542 51
[Insert Witty Sig Here]
I run Windows 2000 on a PC that's 3 years old.. I've got a gig of ram in it, and it works great. I've got Windows 2000 on two or three other old-ass PCs as well, and the only thing I did to make them faster.. was reinstall the OS, cruft-free, every 2-3 years. I still manage to get all my work done, and don't have a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows XP. As much as Microsoft would like me to think, AOE3 isn't enough justification.
I've got some PII class notebooks running Windows 2000 just wonderfully, even in ~128M memory.
Honestly, I don't see upgrading in the next year. All I've done is expand drive space, I put three monitors on this machine, it all works great.
So.. maybe try reinstalling on those old PCs and slobbing in some new memory, and save a few bucks?
My linux boxes, to their credit, haven't needed touching since I installed them - they just work, and in fact, I'm not even sure how they're configured anymore. They're running on P100 class hardware as described in the article.
..don't panic
Microsoft lately has been challenging Linux's suitability for older hardware
I'd love to try to get Windows Vista running on my old 366Mhz Dell laptop...
I have Linux running as a router on a P166 with 32 megs of RAM. It runs Postfix, BIND, nfsd, Privoxy, and Samba, and without a problem. Sure, a GUI might tax it a bit, but for what it does, it runs perfectly.
You could always throw a copy of Windows 2000 on your machine too. It's a hell of a lot faster than using XP.
Computer/Processor 133 MHz or higher Pentium-compatible CPU.
Memory At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM; more memory generally improves responsiveness.
Hard Disk 2 GB with 650 MB free space.
CPU Support Windows 2000 Professional supports single and dual CPU systems.
Drive CD-ROM or DVD drive.
Display VGA or higher resolution monitor.
Keyboard Required.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
It's nice that you can cutdown your window manager to W2K-like levels (or below), but try finding something with the features and footprint of MS Office 2000.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Ok, a few things.
2 51
1) What's the point of this article? Linux worked on these machines when they were state of the art. Is it such a revelation that it still works on these machines?
2) Would Microsoft suggest that Linux is less suitable for a computer with 4 mb of video ram than a copy of Windows Vista or XP? The DRM alone would sap the system's resources.
3) I know that Slashdot's parent company owns newsforge, but would it have been hard to put in a direct link to the article? Here it is: http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/02/13/1854
4) Geeks can now smile that yes, in deed, their operating system runs on old computers. OK, now what? What's the significance? Is it that people won't have to upgrade? Is it that they can keep their old boxes around? Surely if they still had them, they would know this already. And it won't make Windows users want to switch as they are all running their apps on shiny new(er) boxes anyway.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
The issue is how well it runs on older hardware compared with the equivalent MS software, if he's not gonna test Windows then this whole article is worthless.
So of course it can run, and run well, on older hardware. The only question is what you have to give up to make it work well.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Windows 98, I've always felt, was a drastically underrated version of Windows. It was only a 200MB install, in comparison to the 500MB of Windows ME and gigabyte plus of Windows XP. And its workings, by comparison, were simple. For example, Windows 98 had the option to completely turn off the usage of the swap file until memory is filled. Doing so made the entire system run from memory, vastly speeding up the system. As far as I know this is impossible in Windows XP. If you have an old system and toss a bunch of extra memory in it (pennies for older systems) you can make it run incredibly fast using Windows 98. I have an older laptop that I recently "inherited" from a friend. It took about 5 minutes to boot up and 30 seconds to even open a folder. I wiped it, installed Windows 98, tweaked it a bit, and installed Firefox. It now runs beautifully, as fast as my main computer. When I use Windows 98, it almost seems to me as if XP was designed to slow down your computer. Too bad most modern software no longer supports it.
Linux is VERY scalable. You will not see KDE 3.0 with all graphics gadgets run lovely on a Pentium (first gen) with 64 megs of ram, but if you use the settings that were usual in those days, you'll find that even with the latest Kernel and the latest packages it will run just as fast as it did back then. And for most day to day work that such a machine will see (like, for instance, work as my router), this will be sufficient.
:)
Now, one could argue that the Systems that come to us from the lovely town of Redmond offer similar qualities. Win95 will run just as well on a Pentium, just like it did back then. Certainly. But there is no way to make WinXP (or Vista) behave in a way that makes it suitable for such a machine. You cannot cut the system down to something that would run even remotely smoothly on this kind of machine. If it runs at all.
Scalability is the reason. You can simply not scale Windows, no matter what version, the same way you can Linux.
Whether that's a necessity is something you have to answer yourself, though. Do you actually need to run a modern system on an ancient machine? The uses are rather limited. What it certainly offers is to "recycle" your old machines as test boxes. Who doesn't have some old box sitting around, collecting dust? It's good enough for a new life as a quickly patched together web server.
Especially when dealing with code that should best not touch the "live" network (i.e. when dealing with possibly malvolent code), having an old box handy can save a lot of trouble and headaches.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Win2003 requires,
- 133mhz processor
- 128mb of ram
- 1.25gb+ of hard drive space
From memory, that's a computer in the early 90's with some extra memory and a bigger hard drive, neither of which are anywhere near expensive.
It's no surprise that other server operating systems run on old hardware as well.
It's no surprise that Linux will run on older hardware,
Machines that have to boot from floppy or HD are old, and laptops with random pre-Cardbus PCMCIA Ethernet cards are old, and working with them requires distro support for booting from floppy into a system with the right Ethernet drivers and/or support for booting from MS-DOS file systems that you loaded before the first Linux boot. Many of the distros out there _could_ do it, but don't necessarily give you the documentation to figure out how :-)
One trick I'm planning to try soon is putting the laptop disk into an external USB shoebox so I can load it from one of my larger computers, side-stepping the whole problem. That still requires a sufficiently small distro, but at least it's a start.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Linux does run on old hardware pretty well, by Linux I mean base kernel and utils, even with X and a basic WM it will perform fantastic, my specs:
:)
IBM Thinkpad 760XL
* Pentium 133mhz
* 72mb Ram
* 2GB HD
It worked with new 2.6 kernel and xorg 6.8, not bad, trow in IceWM+ROX or XFCE and you have a pretty desktop, the problem was OpenOffice, it did run, very slow but it did, not comparable with office 2000 and win98 on the same machine, that combo was pretty fast for it
The article does make a point, Linux does bring some life to your old HW, but new apps aren't designed for old hardware anymore.
Ofcourse, I used LyX for documents, or abiword and gnumeric, and worked, but looking for something more integrated leaved me with KOffice which did perform fine.
C-x C-c
I put Gentoo and fluxbox on it (cross-compiling the binaries on my desktop - I am not a moron), opera, abiword, gnumeric, mplayer, and even the MythTV frontend, so I can watch shows in bed. It runs really quite snappy, and seems more responsive than my Dad's 1.2GHz celeron running XP.
My brother-in-law is quite suprised that I've been able to breath new life into a computer he was told was a junker. He meanwhile has a 1GHz PIII notebook that he is thinking of again replacing because Windows runs too slow.
No one wants your 500Mhz PC - that same crud use as much power as my 1Ghz
PC.
I _think_ it was SVR4, but the late 80s are fairly old memory by now so it could have been SVR2, and maybe it was X11.* by then. Sure, it wasn't as fast as a Sun4, much less the HP graphics workstation we had which had 48MB of video RAM, but basically it worked pretty well.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Linux 2.4.28-gentoo-r9 i686 Pentium II (Deschutes) GenuineIntel GNU/Linux. Runs apache2, mail (postfix+clamav+amavisd-new+spamassassin), 74 http://www.bitlbee.org/ users and some "other services". Should probably upgrade someday. However, I heard a rumor: If it's not broken, don't fix it.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Win98 is no longer supported by its maker. You can install it allright, but you will find out that modern features won't work on it. You might remember the pains of NT and USB. Now, something like this can and will eventually happen to all systems that are no longer supported by their makers. Some new device arrives and you won't be able to use it.
Granted, if you're not modifying your hardware anymore, that won't matter.
But there are other things. Security and bugfixes being the main ones (you will not get fixes for bugs and security holes that were not discovered during its supported lifetime).
So yes, of course you can still install the "older" versions of Windows on your old hardware. Of course. It worked then, it works now. The question is, though, will a current system work on old hardware? Now, current doesn't mean that you should try to force the latest graphical gadgets onto the machine, current means simply whether you can use a current system the same way you were using the old system.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It seemed like not too long ago that Linux was the best option for breathing new life into 486-class PCs. I remember folks running FVWM and XFCE 1.0 on their 486 and first generation Pentium systems because Win95/98/NT ran too slow on the same hardware.
Now there's actually some FUD that Windows runs better on old hardware? Why is there even a debate at all? Has Windows gotten that much faster? Has Linux gotten that much slower? Has X11/Qt/GTK gotten that much more bloated?
Had an old 100MHz Pentium PC with 64MB mem and 1GB hard drive space that was reinstalled for my dad to use. Tried a really leaned-down Slackware (with Linux kernel 2.4), manually configured the modem, installed WindowMaker with FireFox and the machine took a long while to boot up to a useable UI and everything was godawfully slow... Installed W2K, still same story but less so. W2K mostly sucked because it took up too much space after visiting windows update for SP + the ridiculous amount of patches that had to be downloaded and installed. Finally I put on there what I had originally when I bought it. Win98 with being patched but everything locked down, and using FireFox (which was still noticably slower than the IE that came bundled) but it was more useable. I know this is just one case but using X on an old PC is a big no-no.
why run from Vincenzo?
...not as fast as BSD. The 2.6 Linux kernel has gotten *huge* and running a full-featured FreeBSD install beats the pants off a minimalist linux distro speedwise IME.
Some of my older lab machines had enough disk space, but some of them had two 500MB drives, and it's amazing how much trouble it was installing Linux on it back when that meant RedHat 5 or 6. The problem was that the distro either wanted to split the disk up into various partitions, some of which were too large for one drive and others didn't fill the other drive, or else it wanted to treat everything as one large root file system which didn't do the job either. I'd constantly have installs choke because one drive was 1/3 full and the other needed to be 1.5x full, and there wasn't a convenient way to tell it where to fit packages. I suppose today you can probably do things with RAID to stripe the partitions across disks or something, but a union filesystem of some sort would probably be easier, especially if it could include the CDROM as part of a partition.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
My first Linux box was on old hardware, a 486 DX-2 50 in fact. Netscape was a bit slow, but it made a grade dial-up gateway. In fact, I still have the same machine, it has just slowly been upgraded piece by piece to an AMD K6, RAID-1 file-server and internet gateway using an 802.11 USB stick. At one point it also was my answering machine and it emailed me mp3s of voice messages it recorded using a 33.6 voice modem I got on eBay for $1. Now it boots from a compressed initrd so it can put the RAID to sleep so it isn't so loud.
Big thrill. Windows 95 runs great on older hardware too. Feel the thrill! Here's your cookie.
Isn't giving old machines new life the whole point of Linux? Good luck with Windows 95.
Linux runs fast and smooth on my 1998 beige G3 desktop. I have fond memories of using the Gimp with the KDE panel. What made the beige G3 obsolete is that it burns much more juice than my Mac mini. The Gimp's okay on Apple X11 Tiger.
...but the 2.6 kernel is *huge* so it's not all that much faser than winderz anymore. BSD is a much better choice for old hardware IME.
I have both a mac G4 400 and a few old pc's and have found that the X86 boxes will run quite smoothly with most distro's, however the mac G4 is totally hopeless if running xorg or its predicessor. I've tried debian /yellow dog & mandrake on the mac and all those cd's do is make great coasters
So I'm thinking it depends on what distribution you choose and which desktop manager.
I've heard _great_ things about Vector Linux. Anyone willing to share their experiences? I'm especially interested in desktop performance (browsing the web) on machines with 300MHz and 128MB memory.
I have a Dell PowerEdge 6450 which I tried to load Fedora Core 4 and SuSe 10 on. They failed to install because I think they don't support the PowerEdge 2/DC RAID controller card anymore and there was a blog I found where I could roll my own kernel with it in there. I went with CentOS 3.6 (RedHat EL 3) because it uses 2.4 with all the right modules or whatever built-in. My point is that I was just thinking about how the newer distros are usually NOT friendly to older hardware because they seem to drop off support for older hardware as they support the newer stuff. Like when I couldn't get Knoppix to boot and I realized I had to feed it the "nodma" option. It's just a PITA to struggle with stuff like this in LInux when you just know Windows would find the hardware and use it. Now, I'll probably get flamed and be told I just don't know what I'm doing and I can gather up all the right kernel loadable modules or roll my own kernel, etc. But, my simple point is that it's getting harder to get the newest distros to "just work" on older hardware.
It would have been nice if they tried Xubuntu too. Ubuntu based, XFCE as a light, yet feature rich (to some extent) desktop. Clean, good looking, very responsive. Some screenies here.
I had a 75 mhz Pentium machine running Windows 95. I ran K-Meleon on it. It took a few seconds to bring up pages, but it worked.
Seriously, I got my start with RedHat linux 4.2 on a 33mhz 486 Gateway 2000 with 8 MB of Ram and a 250 MB Hdd.
From day 1 I knew how much more responsive linux was on older hardware.
Sure, it was a dog on big tasks but as the router/fileserver I built out of it it was as good as any Pentium class machine would have been.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Linux works GREAT on older hardware, as well as probably all of the BSDs. I actually prefer FreeBSD though, since it installs and runs on a plethora of old hardware without any hassle. I remember I had two 30GB harddrives running in an old pentium I, packard bell box (with 32MB of RAM) running FreeBSD. I don't know why I did that...I probably just thought it was cool at the time.
If you're running a old 486, you are a personal computer hobbyist. Who cares if you are running some arcane Linux distro or Dr. DOS? It is a very narrow issue vis-à-vis the wider computing community and I am ROTFL at the whole idea of anyone having a sufficient stake in this to be arguing the point. Now whether or not the Ubuntu distribution is appropriate for my Athlon 64 box with six external USB devices including a USB wireless headset/microphone or perhaps some of the distribution, for a first-time Linux user, is a serious question deserving some serious thought (at least from my perspective). :-D
I'm running RH9 on an iOpener. /proc/cpuinfo tells me that it's a WinChip C6 180MHZ
4 gig laptop harddrive
32 megs of ram (shared with video card)
But the worst part is that the keyboard that it came with doesn't have an Escape key.. which annoys me every time I use vim.
Until the machine finally died in 2003, I ran Debian on a P166 Laptop.
Sure, I ran wmaker or oroborous instead of GNOME or KDE, and lynx, or sometimes Phoenix, instead of Mozilla. But it worked fine.
(I tried Opera, but it didn't work out. I was limited to 640x480 if I wanted a decent color depth, and Opera's banner ads took up way too much screen space.)
In short, the Linux kernel runs plenty fast. You just need to pick your UI to fall within your machine's limitations.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I'm suprised I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but the reason I would use Linux on older machines over older Microsoft OS' like Windows 95/95/ME/2000 is because Linux gives you the benefit of still being a supported OS. The problem with older versions of Windows is that Microsoft simply gives up on them. Even if there's some absolutely critical security flaw, Microsoft simply stop caring.
Compare this to Linux and you can use a new, fully patched, fully secure, fully tested release and scale it down to run on your old hardware, I think that's the key difference that's been missed by some here when recommending just using older Windows releases instead.
Put simply, using Linux on an old box means you can run an old box with modern software - modern in that is uptodate in terms of features, security updates and hardware support. It basically feels like when Microsoft gives up on an OS that OS is in a timefreeze, don't expect to have much luck with some hardware/software/security problem that emerged after MS gave up on it, compare that to Linux however and generally you'll have much more luck with resolving said hardware/software/security issue on the same hardware because some kind Linux developer, I guess that's the wonder of open source compared to proprietary.
I use the "Classic" theme, 16-bit color (24-bit is unaccelerated by the driver) with ClearType enabled, and it runs nicely! Office 2003, Firefox, WinAMP, and various 2D games all work perectly fine.
When I tried Fedora Core 2 it thrashed the hell out of the hard drive due to the bloat of Gnome and KDE. Sure, I could have used a lightweight window manager, but I wanted something that approximated the functionality of Windows; turns out that I was better off just using Windows.
Linux certainly works on older hardware, but not with a very good desktop anymore. How hard would it be to use an older version of KDE or Gnome (I remember running them nicely on 64-meg pentiums back in the day!) with a modern distribution?
We apologize for the inconvenience.
The point is it is saturday night and us lonely geeks can sit here and brag on our olden daze crap that is still running something either moderately useful and/or curiously interesting. Ya, there *might* be one guy here using his wifi PDA at a strip club getting a lapdance at the same time he is posting to slashdot, but lets get real here...this is saturday nite geek gab, like usual.
Here's mine, P100 toshiba laptop with a pretty much borked hard drive and 16 megs quality RAM running BlueFlops Linux from floppy images direct to a RAM boot. Gets online and surfs *great*. Best micro distro out there. Next up, Austrumi, 50 megs slack sorta based "live" mini distro, better than Dang Small or Puppy or Vector. Will run good with 64 megs RAM or better, but will run in smaller. FAST. I've only tried it as low as a 200PP processor though, but it still worked very well indeed.
Mac side, perfectly runnning 280c powerbook, I think only a 25 mghz processor, 40 megs RAM, system 7. Great surfer using iCab or nutscrape 2.0, heh.
Minix comes to mind as it was and is designed to work on old machines (at least a 386 with 8MB of ram). It's not as "mature" as the other *nixes of course but you can turn trash into servers with it.
No; MacOS is for fags, Linux is for asexual nerds. Manly men such as myself use whatever they want, because they're cool with their own sexuality.
I read the microsoft old hardware stuff on the eweek link. What zonker tested was totally different, all distros that are lightweight. Why not test the distros that most of the world actually uses (it's called market share) such as Red Hat Enterprise Server or Novell SuSE server? I don't think anyone in Redmond is arguing XP versus damn small linux - get real.
Did you pay for those three or four versions of a, what, $200 operating system?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
And Windows is for assholes.
Guess who's getting fucked?
[;-D
Got it in 1995! It came with Windows 3 or 95 installed (can't remember anymore). From Digital (DEC produced PC's sold at CompUSA briefly before being acquired by Compaq). Couldn't run 98.
I installed debian, and became my first home email, web, and print server. Now is a perfect file backup server, running automated backups of my main machine. Always on, latest debian version. Flawless. The only drawback -- it needs a keyboard connected in order to boot.
Why try some of the Winders alike window managers? Like XFCE, ICE, JWM, or Equinox (EDE)?
I hate GNOME and KDE. I use Enlightenment 0.16.7 which runs nicely on everything from PII400 to AMD64 3200+.
Another advantage of *nix. Right tool for the task. A long ago discovered lesson by a network-centric weenie who just wanted an OS that facilitated my job rather than inhibiting it.
If you think the entire world exists between two OSs I guess you're the one getting fucked.
That aint old... I'm posting this from a steam powered machine.... overclocked it by screwing down the relief valve 3 whole turns...
got a 78rpm Edison hard disk... can't wait to get sound working so I can watch some of those newfangled "talkies"....
I've done a bit of installing on some Sparc machines over the past year, so I know a little bit about running near-modern *nix on older hardware. My first foray into it was when I picked up a Sparcstation 5 for free. It has a 110 MHz CPU, 256 MB of RAM, and an 8-bit framebuffer. The first OS that I fully installed on it was Debian Woody for Sparc. The first installation had GNOME; it ran, but not really in a speedy fashion. I later switched back to lighter-weight environments like fluxbox or XFCE. When I picked up the Ultra 2 (2 x 300 MHz UltraSparc, 640 MB of RAM, 24-bit Creator3D framebuffer), it ran quite a bit better in Debian Woody / GNOME, thanks to the faster processors and larger memory space. Still nowhere near P3 level performance, but to be fair, this was a workstation built in 1996, and was the fastest thing in its day. When Solaris 10 came out in the free RTU license for multiprocessor machines, I installed that. Java Desktop loads up a bit slowly, so I usually log in with CDE, but the other aspects of the Ultra 2 are great for a 10-year-old computer. It can even burn 8X CD-Rs without stuttering. Your average PC back in 1996 probably wouldn't be able to sustain the throughput for 6x, let alone 8x. Once the Ultra 2 became the primary user of the 13W3 monitor due to its 24-bit framebuffer, I relegated the Sparcstation 5 to headless duty, using Debian Woody, then Sarge, and currently NetBSD 3.0.
Right now the Sparcstation series is a bit long in the tooth for graphical use beyond an ultra-light window manager like XFCE, but they were small form factor before there was a mainstream market for it. Companies like Sun and SGI made small workstations with fast processors and great throughput (and high margins and prices!).
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
If I can only afford an old PII or PIII for AU$50, I'm hardly going to spend anotherAU$180 on Windows XP. I'm going to put a Slackware distro on it for free, and have a reasonably functional office/web surfing/email reading machine.
If it's an internet gateway or print server, Linux wins again, because if your going to put XP on it to run such things, you've forked over the price of a proper router or print server that will use less power and be quiter and more reliable.
That's why Linux is better for old hardware, not becuase you can, but because sometimes it's actually worthwhile.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
blue. 98 (even SE) was/is way too unstable for today's standards/expectations.
Have linux running on my 225 mhz 604e with 320 MB of ram.It runs very good,I use fluxbox for my window manager,much faster then running os x via xpostfacto.I use it for a tv in my room,this thing has not shutdown or rebooted in months.Linux all the way!
Here are the system requirements for Windows XP Professional:
PC with 300 megahertz or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233 MHz minimum required (single or dual processor system);* Intel Pentium/Celeron family, or AMD K6/Athlon/Duron family, or compatible processor recommended
128 megabytes (MB) of RAM or higher recommended (64 MB minimum supported; may limit performance and some features)
1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available hard disk space*
Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor
CD-ROM or DVD drive
Keyboard and Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device
In addition to Windows Vista coming in multiple "flavors", it will also be able to adjust its drain on resources depending on your hardware. So it may very well run on your old 366 MHz Dell laptop, albeit not in it's full-fledged glory and maybe a little sluggish. If you can get KDE4 with all it's eye candy running smoothly on that Dell laptop then I will be impressed.
It depends how old your system is. I believe that Debian Woody is still getting patches, but Potato is not; it was released August 14th, 2000. Security updates were discontinued as of June 30th, 2003, or about just under 3 years. Windows 2000 was released right around the same time, and it still gets a few security fixes now and then, though it hit its "end of life" period 4 years after its release. Red Hat 7 was released September 25, 2000 and hit its end of life in mid-2002. Neither product is receiving official security updates, though I'm sure a few kind souls may have backported some important patches. I guess you can manually patch your system over the years by compiling the source yourself, but how many people are really going to do that rather than follow the upgrade path? So yes, you can run an old version of Linux and keep it secure, but it will not be officially supported any longer than Windows and it will put an extra burden on you.
Good luck finding a p133 with 128MB of memory. If it uses SDRAM you might get lucky and grab a bargain on ebay, whereas if your box requires SIMMs you'd be better off buying a whole new box than finding that much worth of SIMMs.
On the other hand, I ran a p200 as my main web server for a good 6 months. A P200 with a 1GB hard disk and 32MB of ram. Yes, 32MB. Running apache, php, and mysql on debian linux.
It wouldn't win any speed competitions, but it worked, more than fast enough.
I put Windows XP on it and the performance is much better. Faster boots, power management, and just all around better performance. I can even watch Xvid and H.264 encoded videos on it! Sure if I ran Linux in text mode it might be faster, but that wouldn't really suit my needs. The "Linux is faster on older hardware" myth is just that.
If you want to pull ancient stuff out of a box, try Star Office 5.x for size, speed and features. It compares very well with the M$ Office that was out when it was produced.
If you want modern software, most of the functionality of Office can be found in DSL, that's why it's so amazing that it all fits in 50 MB. KDE's office suite has most of the same functionality with a much smaller footprint and others make even nicer programs. Abbiword and Kword are both good word processors. Gnumeric is a very good spreadsheet. Newer Open Office suits are only as bloated as Office itself was, that's why you can fit it onto a single CD like Knoppix or Mepis, which expands to a 2GB filesystem when you install it. I've run Open Office 1 on a P150 with 70 MB of RAM. Like the article says, it took time to start but it stayed up and worked well once you got it going. I also ran GIMP, Kontact, Kword and other programs on the same machine at the same time. It got a little slow, but the same level of use with Windoze 2000 would be impossible.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Here's my config:
CPU: Pentium III, 650Mhz
Memory: 192 Mb
HDD: 40Gb
CD Reader
OS : Linux, compiled from scratch. Kernel Version 2.6.15 with Pre-emptive patches. Also added support for Toshiba stuff for things like ACPI etc.
Applications: XFCE as the desktop manager, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice 2.0, GtkPOD, Gimp, GqView etc.
The performance of this system is as good as the 1.4Ghz 256Mb RAM laptops running Windoze.
I love this laptop, even if I upgrade to a better laptop, i will dd the whole OS over to the new system.
Pentium II is old hardware? I was expecting an article on how it'd run on a 286, Mac 512k, LISA, etc. Or at most a 386. Pentium II is a full two generations beyond the 386 which is the minimum Linux will run on out of the proverbial box (tarball?).
It'll run rather well on a 386, as long as all you want to do is use it as a local fileserver or router or something... I suppose if you got your hands on a hardware mpeg encoder/decoder you could use it as a DVR...
Perhaps what the article meant by "Linux" is Linux with X and a window manager? I mean, really, Pentium IIs can decode DVDs (as long as you're not doing anything else).
Of course I'm "still" using a 1.something GHz Athalon and it's way more than enough for me... Though it would be nice to have a faster processor, perhaps a duel core so that I could encode and decode video in real time at the same time... I probably still wouldn't do it but it'd be nice to have...
But in Debian you just type 'apt-get dist-upgrade' and your system will be upgraded to the latest stable. Hardware requirements don't go up and it won't be any slower. You also won't be out several hundred dollars.
Until 2002, my primary machine was a 486-33 Compaq upgraded to a DX2/66 with 56MB RAM and a 20GB HDD. It ran some version of Slackware Linux, and also was the mail server for a few accounts (family, my girlfriend, a couple friends, as well as mine). I even wrote school papers on it using LaTeX and ran a basic X window system with fvwm. At no point was it horrendously slow; in fact, it was faster than most of the Win98/Win2k boxes of people that I knew. It was a sad day when the machine finally succumbed to a power supply failure that somehow fried the main board. Believe it or not, the 20GB HDD lives on as an aux disk in my current server, which is a Dell 1.5GHz Pentium. On that machine, the latest "testing" distro of Debian runs a lot faster than Win Server 2003.
-b.
I am curious, how can I benchmark performance for each OS, and how can I do so that I am not comparing apples to oranges?
What I would like to do is something akin to a bandwidth test, and record the results in a way that is easy to compare.
Can anyone help me out here? Any suggestions will be appreciated.
Today's show is brought to you by the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: 25
yeah, out of curiousity, which version of windows are you running that fits in 32MB of ram?
The apps i used on my p200 were all latest versions - apache 2, mysql 4.1, php5, etc
Amazing someone would say something so stupid, isn't it? They pretended that distributions made for older hardware don't exist and removed XP's built in hardware install blocks to discover that, "If Linux was installed on an older system, such as an average PC of 1997, then the desktop performance falls below what is typically acceptable for a common user" and, "that Windows performed as well as Linux on legacy hardware when installed and run out-of-the-box." That looks like an admission that XP won't run on older hardware, even if you can get around the blocks they built in. Nothing new there. Everyone knows you need at least 128MB of memory just to boot XP and run one or two nondemanding applications. Because there are plenty of distributions that do run well with much less, me thinks they proved the Linux runs well perception valid without realizing what they were doing.
The perception has gained steam as Vista's specs leak out. What you have to remember while M$ touts XP as so light and cute is that it's fiver years old. At the time, XP obsoleted whole classes of computer hardware. It outright refused to install on PII and lead people to throw out lesser hardware. Considering what most people did with XP, this was a huge waste of money. Vista promisses much of the same.
This message typed using Debian Sarge and a PII laptop. Specifically, Konqueror 3.3.2 on Enlightenment 16 and a 233 MHz PII with 196 MB RAM and a 6 GB hard drive. 802.11b works just fine, thank you, and I had two sessions of Inkscape scalar vector drawing opened, 12 spare virtual desktops and I listened to music using Juk while I wrote. There's no version of Windoze that does all of that on any hardware.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This post is being created from an old thinkpad 600 laptop I bought *years* ago (IBM can really make a solid laptop...). It's a dual boot system (Fedora Core 2/ Windows XP Pro), both of which run surprisingly well. On both systems, firefox runs just a *tad* bit slow for my taste...but it's usable and I'm putting off buying a new laptop for as long as possible.
:)~ ), this machine has always just worked. Setting up the linux side of things was a bit of a pain at first (sound card has to be modprobed with some funky arguments and the "quick boot" turned off, the wifi card I've picked up years ago never really had good support, but works consistantly now...), but now I could rebuild the linux side in 2.5 hours from start to finish (It takes forever to load 2.3GB worth of an install image on this old beast!).
:)
This box is solid (again, both windows and linux...I use both and favor neither - each one does it's own thing "better" than the other and some things just as good as the other...and both have their own serious problems). Barring any hardware failures or stupid user errors (me screwing something up, which thankfully I don't do very often
So, as far as the M$ spin on linux - they are just being goofy (as we all know they are known for).
Linux works and works well.
I'm going to miss this old beast when she dies...
Meanwhile, a Japanese hacker had patched the Linux kernel to run on stoneage Nubus Macs, so I used it to load up a Debian distro. With only 72MB of ram, 4MB video ram, it sucked rocks running X, but (comparitively) flew as a server.
Luke, help me take this mask off
You mispelled "Knoppix".
Linux will generally not allow you to just go ahead and make an old computer do everything that a new one might be able to do. However, we recycle a lot of old systems, put Linux on them, and build various small business servers which provide dedicated access to lower-volume services.
You can't do this with Windows because you have no ability to strip the OS accordingly and only run what you need.
My firewall is still running a P1 with 32MB of RAM. I would run it on a 80486 with 4 MB RAM but if a network card went out I don't think I could quickly find an ISA replacement...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Except you're basically comparing an OS that came out in 2001 (XP) to an OS that's being constantly upgraded (Ubuntu) and isn't really meant for old hardware. The "latest" Windows runs nice on 5 year old hardware because that's what was out at the time of it's release. Ubuntu's goal isn't to get the last ounce of juice out of a machine, either. It's just easy to use. A better comparison would be to run an up to date Linux box with the latest KDE and Vista and compare the two. And then of course you could run a different window manager like fluxbox (my fav) or XFCE4 instead of KDE or Gnome.
You throw out a lot of specs there, but you skip the ones that would actually help diagnose your situation. What videocard, what drivers?
Then you draw the conclusion "using X on an old PC is a big no-no" - it's not warranted. If that machine with run W2k usably, it has FAR more power than it needs for a decent X setup - assuming a decently supported video card. Now, if you have a vidcard that doesn't have any decent X drivers available... then your experience would make sense. I'd bet that's exactly what's going on.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
...do not load the opengl (glx, dri...) modules in X. This saves a whopping 8MB of memory
It outright refused to install on PII and lead people to throw out lesser hardware.
Sorry, even though I agree with most of your other criticism that part is pure FUD. I successfully installed Windows XP to a P2 233 MHz (albeit with 320 MB of memory - server). It was kind of slow though (surprise) but not totally unusable at least.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I had a PI with 32M RAM running a lightweight Linux server setup. It had Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postfix and DJBDNS. Ran 50 mailboxes without ever having problems.
I have to admit though that everything was custom compiled for the box to run properly, and no way would it have come close as a desktop. That means specific kernel compile, apache tweak and compile, MySQL compile and Postfix/DJBDNS tweaks and compile. I even compiled PERL for it. Before, it was a desktop and ran Win98 - it sucked.
The sad parallel I would have to draw is that if new high spec servers were configured with the same care, then they would fly. The reason they still seem almost as sluggish as before is because there's bloat everywhere, and it's not getting any better.
My current work desktop has 256M of RAM and a reasonable processor (2GHz or so). It sucks worse than older desktops I have had, because WinXP can't do the business on that kind of machine. The tweaks I can make I have, and they've all taken longer than a simple kernel compile and choice of light window manager.
Linux wins if you know what you're doing, but sadly people who really do know what they are doing are in the minority. The majority think they're good if they can follow an install CD. So comparing apples for apples : latest RedHat/Fedora vs. latest Windows, most admins (the ignorant majority) probably prefer XP because the boxes they buy are "configured" for it, and the install is familiar to them.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I run Linux on a 1Hz machine with 1 byte of RAM. Works fine, though loading Firefox is a bit slow.
Recently I've been trying to install linux on a friend's old Toshiba Satellite (Mem 64 MB, HDD 1,3 GB, CPU 233 mHz), and out of 5 different distros, none runs smoothly. Ubuntu lite doesn't start X, Mandriva does, but runs terribly slowly, Redhat is even worse, and Debian Woody freezes during the installation, and PuppyLinux doesn't install to the hard drive. Any suggestions?
Yacine
Oh my, everything was fine until I got to this part. FUD much?
Just as I thought I'd seen the bottom of the barrel around here another psychotic fanboy surprises me.
Its not just Linux that runs well on older hardware. I am currently running many Digital Alpha servers and workstations all on systems ranging upto 500Mhz. It works beautifully on FreeBSD, NetBSD Linux and Tru64. That is with and without GUIs configured.
Yea, yeah, I know, off topic and everything, but let me relate this little rant/rave:
Here i've got me this 5-year-old Mac (iBook/500MHz-G3-Processor, the first "white" one (a.k.a. "Dual-USB")). Upped it to 640 MB RAM (easy) and replaced the HD (4500/10 GB to 5200/40 GB - not for the clumsy or faint of heart).
It's currently running MacOS X 10.4.5 - i.e. the highest available version of the Mac OS. And it works well. This (by current standards rather underendowed, but sturdy) machine has done it's duty (= work for me) from good ol' Mac OS 9 (work, crash, work, reboot) all the way to today's iteration of OS X (rock solid, tons of actually useful features - feels like whole new machine).
Granted - initially a number of things did get a little slower with OS X... but I'm really stumped to say what... oh yes: scrolling a Finder-List-Window was faster in OS 9, and Photoshop 6 felt a little snappier. Which was a good trade-off when I look at how brick-rock-solid stable this old lemon performs even today. It runs Adobe CS1 well, even AfterEffects 5.5 (sometimes, as a Render-Slave)... and during those nigh-on-six years I've also been using it daily for eMail, Web-surfing (wireless, of course) and the like. Oh yes, it's a jukebox, too (iTunes) and it will capture and cut DV-Video without a hitch (iMovie2, even FinalCutExpress2 (albeit that took a little sweet-talking)).
What was I going to say? Oh, yes, this: Old (Apple) Hardware + new (Apple) OS = more productivity, stability (and even fun) -- at least that's my personal experience.
If you've read this far... thank you, from me and from my good ol' iBook... well be here all week... and probably for the whole next season, too.
(But after that I'll sure as hell get me one of them MacBookPros! (funds providing))
sig? Oh, that sig...
I have recently installed Ubuntu Linux 5.10 on my 400 MHz/128MB RAM laptop. Interestingly, it runs slightly slower than Windows 98, but the fact that it's a much more up to date and useful operating system than the old Windows makes up for that.
Ubuntu Linux 4.10, however, runs faster than Windows 98 and doesn't seem to have much shortcomings. I would, in fact, use that version if it weren't for the better wireless support in 5.10.
There's one thing, though. Old machines generally aren't capable of displaying 800x600x24; so why do all versions of Ubuntu come with that exact resolution and bitdepth by default? It's true that "normal" machines are easily able to display such a screen mode, but I still had to manually edit a text file in order to get rid of the horrible screen glitching that occurred when I started my installation. It would have been nice if it had been able to detect that my video card just doesn't have much RAM, and it would also have been very much appreciated if the Gnome resolution changer actually had an option to change the bitdepth!
Win2k is nice and all, but how much longer will it be supported...a few years tops?
I'd like to see a nice, clean, lean distro that could be a replacement for Win2k and would run decent on, say, a PII 233+ and 64MB (or even 128MB) RAM with a ~4GB disk. That would surely extend the life of a lot of systems out there that just aren't up to XP standards and have no hope of running Vista at all.
Didn't really throw out a lot of specs. It had an on-board, Intel video card I'd imagine, although I don't know for sure since it was years ago. One that I'd imagine would also have "decent" drivers seeing as it existed ~5 years before the distro version I used existed. Seems reasonable?
Also, quoting me doesn't invalidate my observation that I mentioned was only one specific case so you can draw your own conclusions, but I guess it would've been too much trouble quoting that too?
If that machine with run W2k usably, it has FAR more power than it needs for a decent X setup - assuming a decently supported video card
Now you're the one drawing conclusions. Like I said: in my case it did not. Even with binary Nvidia drivers on my current desktop (also an old P3 500...with a TNT2 Ultra video card (happy?)) X doesn't come close in 2D performance as Windows 2000 does compared with a new RH or Ubuntu. 3D definitely is close, if not just as good, though. Maybe it's perception no some small degree like not double-buffering/bad synch causing tearing/flickering that makes it look slow -- but it *is*. Just telling it like it is. Maybe open drivers or this Xgl stuff will make me happy some day.
why run from Vincenzo?
Before my current computer, I ran a K6-300 built from parts scrounged from the local dump.. long story, but this was a downgrade from what I had before that,, but anyway, it was a computer to use until I could build a new machine, and it was free. I used XFLD for the OS (it's Debian, so I did the apt-get synaptic to make life easier) and was a very happy camper. I now run stock sarge Debian with gnome, but occasionaly I still run the XFLD desktop, which is a little better than stock XFCE because you get a start menu and some other nice apps as well. I am with you about XFCE though, I think it's a great GUI.
waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
On some of these distributions the author was running modern applications with no problem. Sure, you can run Windows 2K on this same older hardware, but you also have to run less than modern applications. As the author of TFA demonstrates:
compact modern Linux + old computer != limited, old applications.
They won't be fast to start, but they will run. That's the point. You're off the upgrade treadmill.
All the study is saying, is that modern Linux distributions which are designed to take the best advantage of modern hardware, won't necessarily work on older kit. And one of those distributions actually had a partial success {no X server} on hardware that Windows XP wouldn't even look at: a '486 DX/2 66MHz, with 16MB RAM and 540MB HDD. Another distribution worked on a later machine -- MMX 233 with 64MB RAM and 2.0GB HDD -- where XP failed. This suggests to me that Linux has lower requirements than Windows XP. FC3's "driver problem with X server" on the 2001-spec machine sounds like the graphics card required a proprietary binary-only driver which could not legally be shipped with the distribution {do Knoppix and Slackware bend the rules a little, or is there an open source alternative which Fedora have perhaps "neglected" to include in the hope of persuading users to "upgrade" to the more expensive RHEL? Fedora Core distributions available in jurisdictions where the MP3 patent is invalid still don't contain mpg321 ..... then again, non-US versions of MS Windows don't default to A4 paper and metric measurements either} and so is the fault of the graphics card manufacturer. {Technically, graphics card owners have a right to the information that would be necessary to create an Open Source driver; but the legal system cares more about might than right}.
.diff and .tar.gz} you can tweak them a little before you build them on the fast box, then create a binary .deb package which installs quickly.
I would have expected that any charitable organisation looking to equip refurbished PCs with a Linux distribution would select, create or commission a distribution to match the machines' capabilities {exactly the sort of thing some geeks with masochistic tendencies do for kicks}. I would also expect such an organisation to have access to at least one more modern machine to be used in this task. Start with one of the "expert" distributions: Slackware, Debian or Gentoo. Now I expect some troll will try to have a dig at Gentoo's "compile everything locally" philosophy slowing things down; but actually, as people who have actually used Gentoo rather than simply talking about it know, you can compile the source code with slow box optimisations on a fast box, to create a pre-compiled package which can be installed on the slower ones as easily as unpacking a tarball. Similarly with Debian, if you obtain the source packages {.dsc,
Try doing all that with Windows!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Once you run out of memory a slow laptop drive starting to swap virtual memory is going to bring the system to it's knees - so give up on the eye candy if you don't have the memory and use something with the whistles and bells turned off. Gnome may be nice to look at but it's performance is horrible on low end hardware.
Current linux kernals are running on dog slow embedded hardware with very low memory, so if you have it running slowly on a 700MHz machine something is very wrong. Ask about - and tell people how much memory you have because you never want a laptop to use virtual memory in any OS if you can help it, and more importantly tell people what you want to actually do with the thing - and someone will be to recommend something that will be able to do the job.
Sorry, but one story of a quick attempt and failure does not make it a myth, and sadly most experience you have with windows XP does not carry over to any other OS. One of the first things any of my users that get XP ask me to do is to make it look like Win2k - so I think the user friendly desktop OS idea is entirely relative to when you learned about computers and so disagree with your description of XP.
No-one should expect you to learn about *nix overnight and one of the less easy bits is to set it up correctly - but a distro can do it for the hardware the distro it is targeted for. I'd suggest trying Vectorlinux then put any apps you want that it doesn't have on top of it - it's linux after all, if another distro has better drivers just upgrade what you have to the same kernel (but with old hardware the drivers will be there in a solid form already), and applications should be able to go across architectures - so between distributions is trivial (and if they are static they will just run).
A beowulf cluster of those.
286 40mb hard disc 1mb ram
windows 3.1 boots from dos far faster than any other windows, even including dos starting time it is faster than with xp. Opening things in windows is instantly snappy, click on write or pipes and it just opens, same with reversi. Opening a folder in windows xp just seems sluggish in comparison.
Games sim city, duke nukem or if you want 3d wolfenstein or alone in the dark.
I'm typing this on a 266 MHz iMac G3 with 256 MB internal memory and a 6 GB harddrive, running OS X 10.3.9. OK, you need a lot of patience. Booting takes forever, but iTunes almost never skips a beat, even when I start up FF, Thunderbird and Skype all at the ame time. I also have X always running. Maybe all Unix-like OS's run well on old hardware!
-- Cheers!
I got a second-hand Toshiba Satellite notebook (K6-2 333Mhz, 64M RAM, 4GB HD) last year. It came with W98 installed, but I wiped the HD and installed Fedora Core 3 (not the lightest-weight distro out there). I opted for XFCE rather than Gnome, though. I can use Firefox 1.5 and even OpenOffice.org 2.0 just fine on this notebook, no need to use Dillo (which, with all due respect, can hardly be considered suitable for your daily browsing, considering the lack of proper support for ssl or even CSS) or Abiword. FF and OO.o take some time launching (up to a minute, for the latter), but once they're running they're perfectly usable. If it weren't for battery life, I think I'd be using this notebook for years to come.
I agree that running a Linux distro marginally on an old machine is sad, but thanks to the client/server display, X-windows, a better use of the old hardware is to let them just do the display and what little work needs to be done to make an X connection to a newer machine with much more power. Then the apps can run modern software at modern speed and the user accesses them through an old computer. This is even useful for a single client because you can put the noisey, heat belching machine in a remote location. The big advantage is you can have thirty clients (or more) run from one application server. That reduces your cost of ownership by a factor of the number of clients. This technology that is easy to set up with LTSP or just X command extends the life of the old equipment until the fans/powersupply quit. A little maintenance can keep them going for ten years or more. You can do that with Windows, too, but would you really want thirty clients at once running in that environment (and don't forget the CALs)?
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
We don't have a router except for wireless.
:-).
The device plugged into our cable modem is a P1 133Mhz with like, 32 or 64 megs of ram, no monitor as a matter of fact.
It runs an up to date version of Gentoo Linux, and it is patched, uhhh... well... ocassionally
DistCC doesn't hurt to have set up on our workhorses either.
It has two NICs. One from the modem, one to the switch, and it all branches out from there.
We have uptime upwards of...
Hmmm, let me check.
We're on the home stretch to a full year.
As a musing, this system has been up even since we moved. We plugged it into a UPS and ran it between houses. (More like, we unplugged the UPS it was already on from the wall and moved the entire set of hardware).
It was amusing to say the least.
But yeah, it's a piece of snit, and it works perfectly.
I run Windows 2000 on a PC that's 3 years old..
Funny, I just got rid of the last Win2K OS install in our household... and replaced it with Fedora 4.
We have three legacy PCs (two Pentium IIs and one AMD 800 MHz) that I converted into useful systems for the kids, as well as an old Gateway laptop with broken LCD that's now a thin client with a 19" flat panel in the kitchen, useful for checking emails and websites.
Win2K on the systems began failing one-by-one. BSOD in every case. The laptop was originally a Win98 and Microsoft already abandoned that, and Win2K support for anything is close behind. I grew tired of the constant administrative hassels, especially since kids can always muck up a Windows box, and put Fedora on there (one was Gentoo for awhile which also worked fine).
While Microsoft would have led to these machines being thrown out and my kids having less computer time by having to share something I'd have to buy, they have their own systems. The funny thing is that my sixth-grader commented the other day that they use Windows and Macs at school. He said the Macs are ok but wondered why the Windows systems are always crashing, since both are in the same environment. So if you really care about the kids, don't throw out the old PC and don't even bother trying to upgrade it to a beast like XP Home.
Interesting that a sixth-grader figured out that Microsoft PR isn't honest at all? Course, I think Microsoft would be horrified if it polled on their credibility. "Microsoft PR" in the medium enterprise environment I work in (as a CISA & CISSP certified IT auditor of multiple firms) is just another expression for "myth."
I just recently went through the same exercise, trying to get a good, usable Linux distro on a Thinkpad 600 (PII, 266MHz, 96Meg RAM, 1.4Gig drive, MediaMagic 256??? video). I tried Mandrake 10.1, Mandriva 2006, Fedora Core 3 and 4, Slax 5.0.7 (and KillBill 5.0.6), DSL 2.2b, Gentoo 2005, SimplyMEPIS 3.4-3, and Knoppix 4.0.2. I wasn't interested in fighting with any distro to get them to install and be usable, but I was willing to get around some roadblocks to get them to install. That one thing made me exclude several of the distros because they were too much of a pain to get installed, let alone to run. That included Fedora Core 3 and 4, Gentoo, and SimplyMEPIS. It turns out that 1.4Gigs is just too small for those distros.
I got Mandrake 10.1 and Mandriva 2006 to install, but I had to manually partition the drive to just have swap and root...the automatic partitions left too little space for an install to work. I trimmed out anything I didn't need to run (I wanted an Internet machine...OpenOffice was not an option here due to disk space). These distros installed just fine, and they actually ran usably with KDE 3.2/3.4. Of course, patience is called for, but I was pleased how well a heavy GUI ran on this laptop.
I then decided to go small, since Mand-rake/-riva left too little space on the drive. I tried DSL, but couldn't get it to remain stable on the hard drive...installing gnucach failed, and synaptics trashed working modules such that the thing wouldn't boot afterwards. It turns out this was a learning curve problem on my part, but I got frustrated with it. I then tried Slax. As a LiveCD it is fantastic...it is obviously meant to run from a CD. I couldn't find an easy way to get it working from the hard drive though. After a few attempts, I gave up. The best I can say is to use a hard drive as file storage and boot Slax from a CD (3" will work well).
I then went back to DSL. After the previous few tries, I learned a lot about the distro and how finicky it is about how you do things. It is very easy to trip up. But I have settled on DSL for the laptop...it boots fast, recognizes the Zonet USB ethernet dongle, even through a USB hub, and runs Firefox reasonably well, even with Adblock, Noia theme, and FasterFox running. Now if only I could get my DeskJet 648C working...hpilj(?) is not compiled into the ghostscript so it won't work. I am not sure I want to fight with that for fear of trashing the install again.
Sorry, but I stopped there, and didn't try a full Knoppix install. Oh, and by the way, SystemRescueCD is my friend, but it won't boot on a Dell Inspiron 2650 (ide-floppy locks up). I use that to make backups of my machines (works like Ghost and Partition Magic). It has made me fear less the trashing of the DSL install.
Now if only my file server (PIII 866, 384Meg, 160Gig) would recognize large hard drives (BIOS doesn't, and Intel doesn't have a BIOS version that does)..yes, the 160Gig looks like a 127Gig to this machine. All the backups are filling up the drive!
Almost the same experience here: eMachines Athlon XP 2600+, w/ 512 RAM bought about 3 years ago. Since then I've put in a Radeon 9600, DVD burner and replaced the hard drive. Now I'm thinking of sticking another half gig of RAM in it. Even if I do that, over three years I've spent a grand total of probably $250 upgrading a machine I bought for less than $500.
Sadly , when I leaved, the next admin installed Win2k on the terminals and the machines where thrown to garbage soon after, since nobody would use them.
Bottom line linux runs well on old hardware and makes cheap/efficient terminals for websurfing, writing docments, etc.
Being that Linux is open source and this allows anyone to modify it to run on most any hardware..... Even Linus Himself created an Embedded Linux while working for Transmeta called Modori - http://midori.sourceforge.net/ ... and there is Damn Small Linux - http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ ....and BasLinux (Basic Linux)
http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/baslinux/ (running it on a camera????)
So what is MS really saying?
Its called Libel. And its really more against the programmers than it is against any F/OSS project(s).
It is as well very arrogant, as it insinuates that only Microsoft or proprietary works developers are capable of programming.
Microsoft has been doing this illegal act for quite some time. When is it time to have a class action lawsuite against the jackass that coined the phrase "software pirates" when he called hobbist such, when these hobbist first discovered they can themselves create and fix software?
Need Legal representation for such a case? Where is the EFF? What about funding? Considering who would lose the case and pay the bill, don't we know that teh initial money can be raised (i.e. firefox raising of funds for advertising...)
So why is MS being allowed to continue this falseness, this libel it promotes???
Or Doesn't teh F/OSS communiyty understand that teh more people using F/OSS the more backing it will receive for development and hardware support....
make a checklist with things you usually do on the 2k box. then do them in debian. that should give you a rough idea about which one is faster. also watch the resource usage on both operating systems and try different wms. xfce is lightweight yet isnt completely bare of eyecandy, openbox/windowmaker are lightweight, fast, simple, configurable -- choose your poison (ratpoison? ^_^)
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Remember, that windows comes with the overhead of a windowing system that you cant ditch. *nix doesnt.
While i agree a 'desktop' with out a GUI is pretty useless these days in a practical sence, a server with a GUI is a total waste of resources..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've just successfully installed Debian sid in my Thinkpad 560 (Pentium 100, ~900MiB HD, 80MiB RAM) through a PLIP cable. With some work I managed to get everything I wanted (X, Emacs, Ruby, and text processing tools (fonts, dictionaries, input methods) for three languages) in less than 400MiB. I'll cut and paste my notes below.
--
Always install and remove software using aptitude install and aptitude remove instead of apt-get. Aptitude keeps a log of what packages are desired by the user and what were installed just to fill dependencies, and remove the later whenever possible. This helped me to remove a lot of perl and library cruft. Be sure to add Aptitude::Recommends-Important "false"; to /etc/apt/apt.conf.
Install localepurge.
To run X you need xfonts-base. xfonts-base need xutils, which contains some font handling tools. xutils also contains that stupid imake thing which nobody uses, and that depends on cpp. Thus my system wants to install cpp in order to have fonts! I forced the installation of xutils without cpp, which broke imake. As if I cared. Imake should be in a separate package.
Grok the X package dependencies. With a careful selection of only the necessary ones you can reduce disk usage a lot. Don't install any "task" packages.
Don't install, use or get near anything with xft in it.
Depending on your tastes, it's possible to not install a full perl distribution and save tens of megabytes. As an user of the "stow" perl program, I was glad to find xstow, a stow rewrite in C++.
A good and fast X terminal emulator with proper i18n is rxvt-unicode, which I've been using for a long time and heartfully recommend. But don't install the perl-enabled weirdly-patched debian version, compile your own and configure it to your taste.
Compile a reduced kernel as soon as possible, remove the generic one and purge anything related to initrds. My initrdless kernel boots up more than 2x faster than linux-2.6-486 with yaird. Remember to not enable the trident framebuffer. Oh, and don't confuse yaird with yard like I did =)
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
I've know a linux zealot to claims that linux ran very well on a 386, with X-Window and a complete GUI. He claimed the GUI was just a little sluggish.
When advocates overstate their case, they make the F/OSS community look like a bunch of loons. Which plays right into msft's FUD campaign.
BTW: I recently bought a 1ghz system, with 512mb ram, on craigslist for $65. It's runs either windows, or linux, plenty fast. So the "leveraging old hardward" isn't much of an arguement anyway. Maybe when Vista comes out.
I agree with the poster about NT4.
I ran NT4 w/SP6 on a 120mhz with 64mb of RAM and it was very snappy. Even cutting down to 32mb of RAM didn't slow it down all that much. Office-97 ran very snappy on this system also.
Linux with X-Window, and similar features would be ridiculously slow on the same hardware.
AC, show me Enlightenment on Windoze or any other window manager that gives me thirty virtual desktops, each thumbnailed for easy switching, without a performance hit.
Just as I thought I'd seen the bottom of the barrel around here another psychotic fanboy surprises me.
Yeah, yeah, and there's a cloud of AC morons that wastes their time with drivel like that. Name calling is M$'s only asset.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> I'd love to see you try to get Linux with KDE 4 running on that same laptop. It's not like you can compare
> Vista to a bare Linux kernel, a modern Linux GUI is just as bloated and needs just as much hardware as Windows.
MS compares Windows vs KDE/GNOME because that's the best-looking comparison for them. A lighter WM, like Blackbox, etc, can run on machines where KDE/GNOME crawls. On linux, *YOU HAVE THE CHOICE* to run a lighter desktop or WM. In Windows, you don't have that choice.
Up until a year ago, my main machine was a 1999 Dell Dimension XPS T450. 450 mhz PIII with 128 megs of RAM and an 8 meg ATI Rage Pro video card. BTW "Rage Pro" has a Mach64, *NOT* a Rage128 chip. It originally came with Win98SE. I tried various flavours of linux, and finally settled on Gentoo. Gentoo is an automated build-from-source distro. "emerge" syntax is no more difficult than "rpm" syntax. Building from source has the advantage that you can use all the available compiler flags. In my case...
CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse"
I run Blackbox as my WM and use pypanel as my launch panel on both the old machine and my current machine (AMD 3000+ with 2 gigs of ram).
The PIII was perfectly adequate for me until last year, when I finally ran into stuff that made me want a new machine...
1) I got interested in internet TV. The PIII has no problems at all with 64 kbit streaming audio over ADSL, but even with every optimization, it was dropping frames in streaming video.
2) I got a digital camera. Let's just say that manipulating a 2560x1920 digital photo in Gimp was "liesurely". Plus, with the same monitor, I can push the resolution to 2048x1536. At 4 bytes per pixel, that's 12 megabytes, which is kinda hard on an 8 megabyte video card.
The PIII is now my "hot backup machine". I fire it up once or twice a month and run updates. I back up my current machine (doesn't everybody) twice a month. If it dies, I can copy my latest backups from CD, and be functional in a couple of hours, missing at most a couple of weeks of email.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
So M$ is trying to claim Linux doesn't run well on "older hardware", the kind that the overwhelming majority of home users (and schools, and libraries) have?
20 years or so ago, I read an interview with Gates, and realized the problem: he's a hardware junkey. He can afford the newest, can't everyone?
Lessee, until a year and a quarter ago, I was running RH9, with upgraded kernels and utilities, on two AMD 233s, one with 250M, and one (mine!) with 192M RAM. Other than OpenOffice 1.x (which I refer to as OpenOffice.dog), *everything* ran just fine.
I now run a 900MHz system with 250M. I just upgraded to SuSE 10.0, the latest and greatest kernel, etc. OO.o 2.x runs literally at least 3-4 times faster, so it's no longer a dog. Everything runs just fine (though I run IceWM - KDE is a lot slower).
Oh, and I'm running an ancient Pentium 120 for a firewall/router.
Problems running Linux on older hardware? If you believe that, you believe anything Bush says, and I've also got this bridge for sale....
mark
That being said, you can see how excited I get when I get windows machines to do what I want. It's always an uphill battle. :-)
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
As I write this, I am listening to my music collection on a 200GB usb enclosure hard drive connected to my "ancient" Dell Inspiron 7500 connected to my Onkyo receiver and Cambridge Soundworks which is running Damn Small Linux from a Live CD. I even purchased a WI-FI card to be able to stream internet radio and browse the web. I had totally written off this laptop as a boat anchor till I tried "DSL" and couldn't be more impressed with it's ability to recognize and work without any tweaking at all!
http://www.linux.com/print.pl?sid=06/02/13/1854251
233Mhz PC? What's the challenge?! I ran a minimal version of slakware 7 called Basic Linux on a 95Mhz laptop. It was running Dillo, window maker and busybox going wireless via Symphony. The first time I ran Linux was on a 486/75 laptop having a whooping 500 Megabytes hard drive, slakware 3.4. It was running X and Window Maker. Busybox did not exist for that distro. This release of Slakware had a full blown version of the Wingz spreadsheet and TeX. The laptop only had 28 Megabytes or RAM and I ran on that set up for 5 years.
I was running Linux on a 200 Mhz pentium not long ago as well. It got replaced, but I know that if I drop a hard drive, it'll run Linux pretty well. Honestly, it really makes me laugh hard when I read an article about "older" hardware and the challenge to run on a 300 Mhz PC. I had a PC running full blown KDE 3 on an AMD-K6 300. Performance was not snappy, but it was no slouch either. Why is this even newsworthy?
Bottom line:
Yes, you can run Linux on an older hardware and be effective. This has been shown over, and over, and over and over. My pet peeve about "lightweight" distributions is that they're still too bloated for really old hardware.
Anyway, I personally think that:
-
Any distro with a kernel release level later than 2.4 is not suitable for older hardware unless you turn off of the majority of the drivers and modules.
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The same goes with X. I ran X on older hardware, and is still the largest bloat on it. If you are going to X, X-Vesa is the way to go IMHO.
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Or ditch X. Probably you're better off running Qtopia with Embedded Qt anyway.
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Everything else, it's just how many applications you can fit and as long as you have a suitable compiler and enough imagination, the sky is the limit.
IMO:The DSL like distros is good for a fast Pentium or later. Everything lower than that, you're better off dusting off a copy of Slackware 3.X and using it.
Lou
Vi havas e-poston.
this little dark secret would have put off a lot of purchases. Do you remember how fast processors were in 1996? Businesses,[i.e the cows that Microsoft and Intel were already good at milking] were already in the habit of trashing boxes every two years. That year an old box ran at 25 mHz and a new one at over 100 mHz. I joined a startup that year. We moved into space another co had just left...they left behind "obsolete" equipment. The 25 mHz PC runing linux that I found in a data closet was still loaded with firewall [and all the logs and a admin pswd written on the case]. it would have been good for another two years but an upgrade to a CD reader would have cost too much for the value added. I have a garage full of old PC's that are going to come back to life like dawn of the dead, running Linux...any day now, really.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
From the average user's standpoint, nothing is lost. DSL, the smallest of the batch discussed, has everything 99% of the population wants: web browsing, email, text editing and a spreadsheet. The versions of software used may be low resource, but they are not always low feature. Far more can be done with DSL than can be done with Windows alone. Windows + office is a resource hog that comes with no real light versions, unless you consider very old versions "light". The average user is in no position to find all the drivers required to install and configure an old version of Windows on a random computer, even if the user could buy the licenses required. DSL, on the other hand, pretty much autoconfigures itself with a single boot install. The richer distributions discussed provide features, such as tabbed browsing and multiple desktops, than Windows and Office do not. A small percentage of "power users" might feel confined by DSL but they probably have the hardware and knowledge required to use X termsinals.
If you go the extra step of configuring X terminals, as the author does, you lose absolutely nothing on the terminal. You get all the shiny features and speed without and sacrifice only local storage. If X terminal or net boot set up is too complicated, you can always do "ssh -X hostname" from the command line to get the same effect.
The list of things I'd have to give up to move to Windows is too long to compile in a reasonable period of time. My newest computer is a 1.4 GHz Athlon from the trash, which my 4 year old uses. The cost of outfitting my family's five or six computers with Windows in a way that would approach functionality is well over $1,000. Some of the things I'd lose in that transition are:
There's plenty more and there's some that I could run on Windoze if I wanted to make that kind of extreme effort in time or money. I've got better things to do and better uses for my money than that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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I have tried several of the low-weight distros mentioned in the article, Damn Small Linux in particular has outstanding performance and reliability on old hardware.
The problem the light distros suffer from is the weakness of low-weight open source/free software office apps, e.g. a browser and office suite.
In the open source world, we have openoffice, abiword, koffice, firefox, konqueror, gnumeric etc. Many of these are outstanding but all have hefty hardware requirements to run reasonably. Even with something like a pentium with 32MB RAM they will run like dogs, if at all. Forget it if you have older hardware than that.
The low-weight distros try to fill the gap with apps like siag, dillo, ted, FLWriter, etc. Unfortunatly, these projects just have not gotten much attention or support from the free software community. They have remained small, isolated projects, and though I applaud the programers who have created and nurtured them, they desperatly need more help & resources to add needed features and integration. Couldn't the big, heavyweight projects like openoffice & mozilla either make lightweight versions, or modularlize their features better so they could be used by lightweight projects?
Windows98 had decent office apps (ms office 97 or thereabouts) and worked quite well on old hardware (lets say 32MB RAM or less). Of course, Windows98 itself was crap...Linux with X & a lightweight window manager is far superior as an OS to windows98 on the same hardware... I think its a shame that more resources aren't put on getting decent, basic, linux based desktop apps up to the level MS achieved in 1997... there are millions of old PCs that could be used for these basic purposes that instead end up in the junkyard.
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This picture alone says everything about how well Windows XP can scale.
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If you are not on a network the old wordperfect for linux was a decent wordprocessor, should still be downloadable for the version without a million fonts and will run OK on the original pentiums (since it did on the time). It will probably require a different libc - but version numbers on libraries exist for a reason (and are used by everyone apart from Microsoft) so you'll just need to add that in obviously without removing the existing one.
At the really low end vi (or perhaps emacs) with TeX or other document formatting systems used back when the hardware was new may have to be used.
NetBSD runs on more than 50 hardware platforms, all compiled from a single source tree, and I think many of them can be considered "old": Commodore Amiga, Atari ST/TT, VAX, Sun SPARCs, and many other MIPS, ARM and PowerPC based machines (besides the not-so-old i386 and AMD64/Opteron PCs, UltraSPARC etc.).Check it out!
I'm running older hardware, you insensitive clod!
ROFLMAO!
Name calling is M$'s only asset
Um, what?
http://goosee.com/puppy
Sorry to say but Microsoft ist right if we allow a strange comparison, that is, comparing today Linux-Distributions to older Window-Versions.
/proc/pnp to do this by hand and or edit complicated options for kernel and modules.
My systems, all without APM/PCI/PnP:
1. 486dx1-33Mhz/4MB-RAM/120MB-IDE
2. 486dx4-160Mhz/64MB-RAM/2GB-IDE
3. Amiga3000/030-25Mhz/16MB-RAM/2GB-SCSI
You simply can't install modern distributions on the first system. And if it would be possible it would look totally stupid. You can not even install a textmode-only system with anything else than Slackware (very slow) and Basic Linux (very basic).
The second system can be made to run Ubuntu but sucks increadibly big time - it takes 8 minutes to boot and then crawls to no end. Same for Suse 9.1 but even slower.
Enter Basic-Linux:
Boots on both systems in 20 seconds. Installation is a piece of cake. On the amiga I had to recompile a lot of stuff but then works fine too.
Slackware: Painfull to install but at least usable on system 2. Not for Amiga.
NetBSD: Installs and runs acceptable on all systems.
Debian: Painfull to install and painfull to use except on system 1). Debian is much to fat for old systems.
My experience tells me that there are several caveats:
1. PnP - modern distributions expect PnP, otherwise they don't run at all. Be ready to use isapnp and/or
2. booting from CD - modern distributions expect that they are booted from CD. Sorry but a 15 years old 486 doesn't even have a CD. There are no disks for Ubuntu and in most other cases the disks don't contain all modules needed especially some weird old 486-scsi-vlb-drivers are missing.
3. Giant RAM-disks. All systems use very large RAM-disks for installation except Basic Linux. How do I load a 24MB RAM-Disk on a 16MB Amiga? Or a 48MB-RAM-Disk on a 4MB 486?
Ah, btw, Windows95 installed without much hazzles on the 486-systems and runs quite well.
"Life is short and in most cases it ends with death." Sir Sinclair
I checked the article, hoping to see some realistic story about how the current main distro's fair on a bit older hardware, and to e.g. see a minimal value for e.g. a FC4 with KDE or so.
I was pretty disappointed when it took the specialist distro PoV (Ok, due to historical sympathies, I still count Slackware as a main distro).
How would you think Slashdot readers would react if Microsoft published a review with the claim in the opposite direction using a cut down XP ?
rilly...he's obviously a microserf;-}
i thought you story was very entertaining...
I tried for about 6 months to get *nix running on my Toshiba Satellite 225CDS. (Pentium 1 133mhz, 16mb ram, 1.5gb HD, CD drive broken so only floppy available, 1 USB port, Cardbus PCMCIA, originally ran win95) I was able to get Debian Woody and NetBSD running, and was able to get X11 and Fluxbox running, but man was it slow. It took literally a day to compile things. So, I finally caved and bought an extra 32MB of memory, and it made all the difference. I ended up putting DamnSmallLinux on and it runs fairly well. My only quarrel is that the laptop has CardBus, not pure PCMCIA. The reason I'm upset about that is I got a Linksys WPC11 v4 from my boss for free, so I figured I could use it in the only laptop I had lying around my house. The card is said to work with Linux using the Ndiswrapper, but the card will not work with my old, inferior laptop.
I recently picked up a perfectly functional 486-dx 66mhz Cyrix clone cpu laptop (circa 1993 - made by AST - Canadian company which no longer exists) for $45 from my local Goodwill computer store. It came with 20 MB ram, a 500 MB hard drive, two pcmcia ports, and the usual mix of parallel, serial and keyboard ports. The LCD monitor on it works perfectly, all of the keyboard functions work, and it has a built-in trackball that also is in working order. The outer case is in nearly immaculate condition - only a few scratches here and there. The battery needs to be refurbished or replaced - that is true of any 13 year old laptop.
It was running DOS 4.1 when I got it (I assume this is what it was originally loaded with). I decided to improve its utility by loading Slackware 10.2 on it (You can see the full blown procedure I used here). I did not want to use the Zipslack install method (as mentioned in the article, you have some performance issues I could not afford on such old equipment). Without a CDROM, I would need to furthermore modify the installation process. I happen to have a Iomega parallel port zip drive, so I used the boot disk for the zipslack installation to access this drive. The boot disk assumes your root disk(s) will be on the parallel port device. The problem with that is that while the zipslack install disk can recognize and use the zip drive for installation, the regular installation root disks do not (have to talk to Patrick about that). Luckily, you can specify another mount location (just not the parallel port drive) - so I set aside a 100MB partition on the hard drive, and used that for the installation.
I booted the system from floppy using the zipslack root disk and the standard installation floppies. Then I mounted the parallel port zip drive, and partitioned, formated and mounted the 'source' partition on the hard drive. After that it was a simple matter to copy over the slackware packages I had earlier copied onto a zip disk from my workstation. Finally I kicked off the setup utility after partitioning the hard drive's remaining space. After that, the install was normal. Starting with a 350 MB root partition (used 50MB for swap, and the 100MB source) - I ended up with 25% free space (used about 225 MB for the packages I loaded). I was also able to free up the 100MB source partition afterwards - so I have a whopping 175MB to play with.
Note that I did not load all the packages available from the Slackware distro - most of the A and AP packages, the key network packages, and some development packages (python). So, no X-windows. However, I found an application called 'twin' (Textmode WINdow environment) that emulated an X server, providing multiple text-based windows that have all the usual controls (resizing, scrollbars, window shade, minimize etc). Twin runs very fast on the 486, and provides the multiple window capability (including copy/paste between windows) that you would need for most jobs. Twin is an older program - last updated in 2003, which I had to build on my workstation, then move over to the laptop via the zipdrive.
Without a graphics capability, most of the modern tools available in KDE or GNOME are out of reach - but that is okay. I use 'jed' editor (emulates emacs commands - but smaller footprint), and am writing my own tools in python - basically to capture thoughts, and provide automation for uploading my field-notes onto my server when connected to my home network (saving my pennies to get a pcmcia NIC soon).
Extending the life of the laptop was well worth the trouble. While it may not be cutting edge in terms of looks - for what I do it gets the job done.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
My favorite example is GeeXboX which shows the perfect use for linux on old hardware. Turning that ancient Pentium II system into a HTPC. I personally ran it on a P2-233 and found I could watch a surprising amount of my MPEG4 files and even older backups like RealMedia (REALLY old...) DVD playback requires more power (or a Holywood+ card) but, still at least equal to, if not better, than the requirements of getting DVD playback running smoothly in Windows 98 (I got rid of the P2-233 for a SMP P3-500, so I now am above spec rather than below.) All this is thanks in no small part to the handy way you can cut out all the fat and keep only what you need even in the kernel itself (for example, no need for Amiga filesystem support on that HTPC.) The way linux handles hardware does help though. I have run a live windows disc before and if I ran it in certain hardware, it would demand a reboot to support that hardware and dump me into 640x480x4 safe mode until I did. Since it was a live disc, a reboot just rinses and repeats.
Overall, Windows has it's ups, but, it's downs are where linux comes in handy (and I wouldn't recommend running XP with less than 512MB if you want smooth gameplay or less than 256MB if you want smooth anything. GeeXboX should run smoothly on 128MB. Heck, it'd probably run smoothly on 64MB...)
I do not do any heavy compiles on this laptop.... for that I use one of the servers in my office, and transfer the compiled binaries. RPMs work pretty well too. It would have taken a few days at least to compile X... but thanks to an dual xeon linux server in my office, it takes a jiffie. Also, you need to keep an eye on your swap usage. Too much of it, and it will take your system down to a crawl.
I've gotten in to the habbit of only one program at a time, and I made my swap ~128MB, so i haven't had too many problems. I don't think I would've gotten that dinosaur of a laptop running so well, so easily if it wasn't for DSL (damn small linux).
1. WTF did you get the laptops with support for that much RAM?
2. People you pay $$$ to don't work with shit tools (I mean the laptops not you).
3. Themes? but the display won't support any sort of colour scheme or res? BS
4. Groundbreaking == the influx of M$ PR wannbes & actual PR posters (*)
(*) I have my own PR ppl - You get to know how they write to make my ads fall under the radar as news. Slashdot for the last few years is getting frequent posts from "Insightful" under the radar of flamebait posts.
Watever.