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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?"
I have a similar laptop, although mine only has 16 MB or RAM. I've got a better processor, though. Anyway, I see several people have suggested run a distro from that era. Indeed that works--sort of. My old laptop runs fine with a Redhat from that era, or a Slackware (or whatever Windows it came with, for that matter).
The reason I say it works "sort of" is that if you just run a distro from that era, you have a browser of that era. I had hoped to use my old laptop as basically a terminal for configuring routers and other things like that which have web interfaces.
The problem is, all my routers have web interfaces that assume browser features that are too new for that era. I was not able to find a browser that was new enough to actually work with my typical consumer home router and still run acceptably on the old system. I think I got Konqueror to work once--but it took something like an hour for it to start.
I think the browser is going to be the determining factor as to whether or not this is feasible for you.
Or a current BSD distribution. On old hardware I typically install netbsd. I have tried Minix but the hardware compatibility is not good.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
why use a floppy? take out the hard drive and install the base OS to the drive from a host PC. I do that all the time with tablets as they dont have CD or floppy.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Hell I bought a new iPhone 3GS today for $100 -- at that price point it's a disposable item.
WTF!?
Sorry, but something that costs $100 isn't a disposable item, it still costs a reasonable amount of effort to earn that much money. Our currency hasn't become that inflated yet...
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
The MAIN problem I see with using old now unsupported distribution versions of BSD / LINUX is that security patches for such versions and their packaged applications are no longer generally being offered / maintained, and there will be dozens or hundreds of potentially trivially remotely exploitable code execution, DOS, and other security vulnerabilities in the OS, the services, and the applications, and there will be nothing you can easily do to fix these problems lacking official maintenance and contemporary patch package releases for the version you are running. Even some of the "long term support" versions of products are only supported for a few years, and the oldest of which that are still supported are still often too new for the type of hardware the OP refers to. If the OP wanted to compile her/his own BSD/LINUX distribution, there would be better hope of using modern version / patched software but configured to run on that old hardware, but that is probably way too much work just for an "appliance" in search of a convenient distribution.
The problem with non mainstream distributions like Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, LTSP, et. al. seems to be either still insufficient portability to old CPUs with little RAM, or an infrequently updated monolithic distribution model that isn't really based on individually freshly updated packages / patches such that the most recent overall distribution is probably months or a year or more out of date with respect to security patches and bug fixes.
I've got an old 64MB Pentium based laptop with a fine KB / screen / HDD / CD but a slow CPU and not much RAM that I've also
been looking to turn into a basic web/email terminal for very basic internet access (e.g. no flash, no silverlight, not even AJAX sites, et. al.).
I've failed to boot the most appropriate known Debian Live CD version on it. I've failed to boot Linux Mint 6 & 7 on it. I've failed to boot Fedora Live CD and Ubuntu Live CD on it as well. It seems like most modern LINUX distributions don't like running on 64 MBy RAM, or with CPUs with these kinds of limitations.
I've run into similar problems with a Pentium based Fujitsu laptop with 256MBy RAM too.
I believe part of the problem is likely something that I started running into with LINUX and BSD distributions several years ago with my Mini ITX VIA EPIA C7 / EDEN based motherboards. They don't support the platform OPTIONAL X86 CMOV instruction, but for a long time there was (and maybe still is) a GCC bug that emitted code that uses CMOV but doesn't do the mandated run time check to see if the instruction is supported and provide a work-around. Further some of these are not "i686" class CPUs and may lack other features that some kernels are built to rely upon, whatever those are.. SSE, SSE2, whatever. Because of the CMOV GCC / kernel problem and the transition from "i386" compatible kernels to "i686" compatible kernels being commonplace / the minimum supported by the distribution media, I started to have to compile custom BSD (OpenBSD / FreeBSD) and LINUX kernels on some machines as of several years ago.
Now I would assume the GCC bug relating to CMOV is fixed or well known, but AFAICT the distribution maintainers just mostly stopped caring about old CPUs and limited RAM configurations and turned on optimizations for e.g. i686, i586+CMOV or whatever by default for their packaged binaries / media, hence perpetuating the incompatibilities with old i386 / i486 CPUs.
I wish there was either an embedded version of something like VNC / RDP / X that could act as a graphic / audio / mouse terminal to a remote PC/VM that actually ran the OS and applications. AFAIK most of those things need a fairly respectable OS distribution and X11 and so on to run on top of, thus making the problem of having a secure terminal almost as hard as having a secure PC with a small general purpose distribution.
Otherwise I wish there was some kind of BSD / LINUX distribution that was geared to handle hardware with old i386 / i486 class
But it no longer receives updates for its applications or internals, if that matters to the user. The project fell apart a few months ago.