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Installing Linux On Old Hardware?
cptdondo writes "I've got an old laptop that I've been trying to resurrect. It has a 486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM, a 720 MB HD, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 640x480 VESA video. It does not have a CD drive, USB port, or a network port. It has PCMCIA, and I have a network card for that. My goal is to get a minimal GUI that lets me run a basic browser like Dillo and open a couple of xterms. I've spent the last few days trying to find a Linux distro that will work on that machine. I've done a lot of work on OpenWRT, so naturally I though that would work, but X appears to be broken in the recent builds — I can't get the keyboard to work. (OK, not surprising; OpenWRT is made to run on WiFi Access Point hardware which doesn't have a keyboard...) All of the 'mini' distros come as a live CD; useless on a machine without a CD-ROM. Ditto for the USB images. I'm also finding that the definition of a 'mini' distro has gotten to the point of 'It fits on a 3GB partition and needs 128 MB RAM to run.' Has Linux really become that bloated? Do we really need 2.2 GB of cruft to bring up a simple X session? Is there a distro that provides direct ext2 images instead of live CDs?"
Find a distro from the same era. Redhat 2.1 (and I'm not talking redhat enterprise 2.1) circa 1995 will install and give you an X environment. Maybe even good old 3.03 would fit the bill.
You'll be looking at older distros. I certainly had X running on that kind of hardware back in the day through Slackware, and all its versions can still. We're talking a machine from the mid-1990s, so you'd be looking at Slackware 3 or 4 or something like that. You could try the older versions of Debian if they're still around, too.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It may be too limited, but would Damn Small LInux http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ > be sufficient?
I can attest to BasicLinux on old hardware like yours, at 2 Floppys worth of space, X and Links pre-iinstalled http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/
A Trove of these things:
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/
Promising:
http://atomic.eyedropvideo.com/remote1.shtml
Non-X woth graphical browsing:
http://blueflops.sourceforge.net/
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I have an ancient Toshiba satellite running a pretty current version of desktop-BSD. Full graphical desktop extremely small footprint etc...
Found it http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst
486MHz? You mean an Intel 486?
Agreed. Sometimes though, it's fun to do something "just because". A lot of people doing this have dug up dad's old work laptop out of the attic/basement during fall break and are desperately looking for something to do. In high school, getting linux running on any sort of ancient mobile device gives you serious geek cred. I remember back in high school some guy had found (and got working!) and TRS-80 portable that ran on something like 15 D cell batteries, and could dial home to his linux box using it. I had a laptop I attempted installing Deli linux on. It seems the main problem with these older computers is finding working floppy drives. But when you're 15, broke, single, and a nerd, you make do with the hardware you have.
That said, there is some incredible server hardware (like you said, P3 and above) 1 and 2U rackmount servers with dual processors on craigslist for less than $120 usually. This is in Dallas, YMMV.
moox. for a new generation.
I can attest to the Debian install. I did this in 2006 with an old 486 laptop with 24MB. Though the above link brought me to the wrong place when I followed it.
Try
http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/etch/main/installer-i386/20070308/images/floppy/
Its got a lot of floppy images that will take you back to the old days. I had some sort of trouble with the laptop install. The kernel ran fine, but I think the installer had trouble for some reason. I might have ended up apt-get --ing a lot of things. But in the end the system ran. It runs a nameserver and has been up for over a year. Nice thing about laptops is that they have built in UPSs.
You can still download floppies for a FreeBSD Net Install. Assuming your network card works with the drivers on the boot floppies you should be able to do a base system net installation of FreeBSD and then build whatever else you need from the ports tree afterward (or install the binaries from the packages collection. Should make for a small, clean installation with only what you need and nothing else to take disk space or consume your limited resources.
Some people may still have misconceptions about Gentoo. The negative stereotype has long passed, though. Gentoo is, really, a meta-distribution: a dist that lets you make your distribution based on what you want and need.
You could do what some folks have suggested and get a really ancient dist, and that may be fine .. but it will have all the limitations it had back in the day, and nothing new without a lot of manual compilation and work. (No newer shells, html renderers, etc.) Gentoo just automates the process, and since you're building for x86, you could easily build on another box as the parent suggests. (It's actually not trivial to truly cross-compile a dist between architectures last I checked, but I haven't really done a lot of research. However it is trivial to build for a different architecture which the build machine supports.)
This way you get all the stuff you want anyway, and all the work to do so is streamlined. Building a boot disk should be easy (as long as you can find a disk drive for your current box!). Check the wiki for details on how to do a lot of specialized things.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
QNX is not a linux distro
hey i went thru this a few months ago. a laptop w/ a 100 mhz pentium 1, 24 MB of SDRAM in a non some weird looking non SODIMM format. about a 500mb of hard drive space, a singular modular bay with a floppy drive module, an extended battery module, and a cdrom module. serial, parallel, and pcmcia slot but no usb. It came w/ a pcmcia 802.11b wifi adapter but no ethernet adaptor.
I tried ubuntu 9.04, tomsrbt, dsl, and puppy. funny enough i had the most luck w/ ubuntu. It was the most hardware compatible and i was able to perform a bare minimal console only install. it would boot up and i could log in but it only had a few KB of memory free so trying to do much of anything would send it thrashing. I dont really remeber what the issue w/ puppy was but tomsrbt and dsl both there were hardware compatibility issues that kept me from installing.
After I got bored with it, I tried unsuccessfully to give it away so it eventually found its way into the dumpster.
Runs on 486s, still.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some times you don't need anything more powerful.
Plus that $30 or $40 is still money out the door, then you have to spend time looking, finding and then getting (ie picking up) the new hardware.
If you have hardware that works, why bother upgrading?
put it in a frame or something
Do this, literally.
I took a similar laptop, flipped the screen and put a wooden picture frame around it. Now it is a digital picture frame. Of course, without USB, cd or network, it is a little painful to actually get the photos onto the computer.
Plus, you get peer reviewed statements vetted by each other's karma, something you can't get on google.
That's gotta be one of the funniest things I've seen all day. And I've been reading this site for nearly 10 years.
Or go with a current Net- or OpenBSD for that more patched and secure experience. FreeBSD recommends at least 24MB of memory, so it might also fit, theoretically. A Linux distribution with a custom kernel and carefully selected userland could be a possibility as well, though it might require some extra work.
Hey... try Breadbox Ensemble! It will revive any old PC! It is still in active development and may even have an application for you. http://www.breadbox.com/