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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."
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
[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
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.
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?.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
On the topic of old Dells and this thread - the boss wanted me to spend $1500 or somesuch nonsense on Listserv software and licensing. I pulled an Optiplex GX110 (P3 733/128MB ram) out of a closet. Not exactly as described in the article, but something that was no longer in use on our network. Toss a basic Debian install, exim 4, and Mailman on that puppy. Boom. Bought a $30 switch because I'm lazy (no wiring!) and plugged it in over in a quiet corner of the office.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
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.
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.
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?
So what are you going to do with the $1470 remaining?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I put fresh installs of Win98 on two different systems (a Pentium2 400 and an AMD K6-3 400) about 5 weeks ago. I'm lucky to have legit licenses for both of them.
On one system I have LinkSys NC100 cards which Win98SE doesn't ship with drivers for. I have the floppies but, trouble is, the FDD is crapped (come to find out the floppies are dead, too). I had to boot back to Debian to fetch the drivers. Once connected, windowsupdate.microsoft.com had no problems sending all of the updates from the original CD installation to current to me. WMP 10, DX 9, IE 6 (with all security updates), no problem. To be honest I don't know when the last time there were any new updates added for the underlying OS but it runs tip top. The only problem I had was, 5 weeks ago, DiamondMM requested an e-mail address to send instructions on how to obtain the latest drivers for the V550 (RivaTNT) card. After applying all of the MS updates the v2.02 (original CD) drivers were nonfunctional and the v3.68 (the latest as of 2004 and the newest I had) drivers had a really nasty quirk--after about 20 seconds the top 1/4 of the screen would end up on the bottom, the screen would be pushed up with about a 1/8 screen height black bar, but the mouse would (of course) still act like the screen was fine. Have fun finding "Shut Down" in that scenario (CTRL-ALT-DEL, TAB, TAB, TAB, ENTER, ENTER). The v2.54 drivers work (it helps to keep old software sometimes) but DirectX support doesn't include 7. I just checked the DiamondMM site now and they no longer have the silly "give us an e-mail and we'll send the instructions to you" (and throw your e-mail address into our nice corporate hopper) policy--unless that's something they only pull on people who cruise in on IE but not Moz. I doubt that I'll ever reboot that system and try the new drivers, though. It runs Debian nicely. Packet forwarding also works in Debian with a little sysctl and iptables. On Win98SE the dhcpsvc.dll (I think that's what I tracked it down to) is either missing or the lib is incomplete. ICS doesn't work on 98 until after I put Norton's firewall (with a newer dhcpsvc.dll) on the system. Norton, even with a bare minimum install and turning off all the automatic notification crap, makes the system unstable as hell once it fetches the, and I'm not kidding, 10-15 updates which it needs. Talk about reboot hell.
On the other system the drivers which shipped with the Dlink DWL-G520, v4.00, don't work with a default Win98SE installation. The AirportXtreme software is installed, I can see my access point (WEP encrypted) correctly, but it never associates. I know from past experience this is fixed with the latest Dlink drivers but, since the system is connected via wireless, I had no way to get to my server and fetch them from my archive. The CDRW is here in the workstation. I didn't feel like screwing around with it so I promptly installed Debian from 2.2 CDs, put in some madwifi drivers (from an archive CD), and haven't turned the system off since.
I bet Win98 still works pretty well once you manage to get through all of the updates and reboots. The real issue is the firewall/anti-virus that's still necessary. If I put 98 systems on the 'net without the firewall/AV they'd probably run quite well. It's anyone's guess as to how long an unprotected 98 system would last on the network.
I don't know how current you mean by current. Both of these systems installed and ran Win2k quite nicely and both run Debian Potato, Woody, Sarge, or Sid with no problem. I don't have a copy of WinXP that I can try. A new laptop should be here early next week. If the manufacturer is nice enough to supply an actual WinXP CD and not just some OEM recovery image bs I might try putting XP on the workstation to check out the performance. Of course I'll have to keep it off the open network. I wouldn't want MS invalidating my brand new laptop's key because a hobby experiment tried to call home.
The government itself is not stealing your liberties. Their new programs are enabling criminals who will.
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.
I have ubuntu running on a dell inspiron 3200 w/ a 266 Mhz processor and 112 MB Ram
Wow, that really puts our Pentium 200mhz Laptops with 80mb of Ram and 4Gb Hard Drives running WindowsXP to shame... (Themes enabled, OfficeXP, and development tools as well. We actually make our developers use these laptops, not only during testing cycles, but in day to day use to ensure the code they are writing meets this baseline.)
The fun point about these laptops, is that they benchmark and do run 20% faster than when they did with the Win98 that shipped on them. (As you might guess, we have a bunch of identical drives we can swap in and out to test various OSes on them.) XP is the fastest, even faster than Win2k and Win95.
I don't mean any disrepect, to you or ubuntu, and it is cool you are getting good performance out of your setup, just don't assume it is groundbreaking.
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...
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.
Is that like an i3.14159...86? ;)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
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).
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
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
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.
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