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Installing Linux On Old Hardware?

Posted by Soulskill on from the where-are-those-old-telegraph-drivers dept.

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?"

17 of 507 comments (clear)

  1. When you have a machine from that era... by NaCh0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:When you have a machine from that era... by icebike · · Score: 5, Informative

      DSM Damn Small Linux fits in 16meg

      http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    2. Re:When you have a machine from that era... by DoninIN · · Score: 3, Informative

      DSL is absolutely the way to go. I used on it a 586 133 a couple years ago and it rocked and a K6 233, and it really kicked ass on. I think it was a Pentium 2 350, that last one ran firefox pretty nicely if I recall correctly.

    3. Re:When you have a machine from that era... by icebike · · Score: 3, Informative

      Dead you say?

      http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

      The site is up, the forums are running, its stable.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    4. Re:When you have a machine from that era... by donscarletti · · Score: 3, Informative

      Guess you idiots can't read as he stated the laptop he's talking about pre-dates USB and doesn't have any. Nor does it have a NIC and the HD is less then 1GB

      You are an extremely rude person. Even if guides to install DSL in _exactly_ that situation like this were not so easy to find, anything you can copy to a Linux formatted hard disk from a Linux rescue floppy can generally be installed. DSL is a great candidate.

      --
      When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
    5. Re:When you have a machine from that era... by induran · · Score: 5, Informative

      The main dev for DSL left, the updates are few to null. If it's not dead, it's dying. A newer, smaller, and active distro by one of the main devs of DSL is called TINYCORE. It's 10mbs and can direct-copy to an active hard drive to install. If TinyCore is too big, the same dev makes MicroCore. A full 2mb smaller.

  2. Older Distros by MightyMartian · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
    1. Re:Older Distros by Bootarn · · Score: 4, Informative

      Indeed, I have installed both OpenBSD and NetBSD on an i586 machine with 32 MB RAM in the past without any problems at all. Both worked great with my Xircom PCMCIA ethernet card, but I think NetBSD did the best job of detecting everything.

  3. Personal Experince by Jean-Luc+Picard · · Score: 5, Informative

    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/

  4. Well, not hard to find... by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Informative

    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..."
  5. Not technically Linux but... by eronysis · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have an ancient Toshiba satellite running a pretty current version of desktop-BSD. Full graphical desktop extremely small footprint etc...

  6. Re:Try Debian by hackersass · · Score: 5, Informative

    Found it http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst

  7. 486MHz? You mean an Intel 486? by Bleek+II · · Score: 5, Informative

    486MHz? You mean an Intel 486?

    1. Re:486MHz? You mean an Intel 486? by ibmman85 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm surprised no other comments (well, that I saw) picked up on that. While it's not impossible for a 486MHz machine to have shipped with those specs, it sounds more like a late high-end 486 system- especially the video. Well, I guess all of it actually. 486MHz would have been K6-2/3 (overclocked) or (overclocked) P2 or P3, and most of those systems shipped with hard drives over 1gb, and more than 32MB RAM. I think not having a CD-ROM and especially NO USB points toward it being actually a 80486... If it's a 486 CPU, even if it's something 'nice' like a DX4, it's probably not worth it. Unless you really have a very good reason... Redhat 6 or earlier works pretty well, I used to have a really decent Redhat 6 server setup on a P100 with 64 MB RAM but considering how cheap you could get other hardware for, unless it's for some proof of concept of the re usability of hardware from past eras, it's really going to be a pain.

  8. Re:Try Debian by jonniesmokes · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. Seconded by oGMo · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  10. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 3, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion