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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..."
If you're lucky and can actually find it , QNX had a whole distro on a floppy. :)
It was intended as a demo , but had full features like file browsing and some net.
That might be able to boot the machine. But frankly , i know of no other distro
still able to boot and install via a floppy.This will prove interresting to follow.
Im just as eager to find out as you
Happy hacking
Older versions of Debian supported floppy installs. The last time I tried it (with etch I think) I had some issues that annoyed me and the response I got is that nobody on the dev. team wanted to suffer with a kernel image that doesn't have the kitchen sink loaded so they crippled/dropped floppy install support. Still once you have an older system running it is trivial to upgrade if you have some connectivity.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I have an ancient Toshiba satellite running a pretty current version of desktop-BSD. Full graphical desktop extremely small footprint etc...
Slackware 7.1 would probably support that old lappy... I used to swear by it back in the day. The only issue you may have is the NIC. Make sure, though, to put on some sort of lightweight WM, like blackbox or flvwm(95). KDE was the system default for the 7.x series, and was a bit of a hog, FYI. (To this day, the closest to a heavyweight WM/DE I will use is xfce4...) Good luck! Also, let us all know what you end up putting on the old girl... --Stak
Holy happy hippy crap!
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.
...and install Debian. Install only the base system: select no "tasks". Then put the drive back in the old machine, configure the network, and install what you need.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
486MHz? You mean an Intel 486?
A lot of posts here claim that Linux now a days is bloated, has too many lines of code, too many dependencies, requires too many resources, bla bla bla... These posts conclude that an older linux distro is necessary. But what about the various embedded systems that have even slimmer resources than what we have here, and run Linux fine? It may be that most distros now a days are meant for new hardware and the kernel defaults to more demanding settings. But all of this can be tweaked and customized at ease. Play with Gentoo. If this doesn't fare well, investigate Linux distros for embedded systems.
ZX2C4
Win95. I believe that the original install CD had a utility to create floppies for a full install. Do that on your main machine, install Win95 on the laptop, then download what you need. I know it sounds stupid, but I'm guessing that Win95 will recognize all of your hardware and actually get you on line faster than trying to sort out the linux drivers for the hardware. Then do a dual boot install and keep Win95 until you get the linux install hashed out - it will beat downloading stuff on your main machine and then copying it to floppies.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You're using hardware that is close to twenty years old. I don't think it's fair to say that because linux has kept up with current technologies (CD-ROMs and USB drives) that it has become bloated. Some other people have pointed out, correctly, that you should be looking for distros from the era if you expect it to install easily on your hardware.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
I know most of the /. crowd is not Gentoo friendly, we even have a Gentoo meme :)
But seriously.. You can use emerge, with portage et all, to build a small and optimized/dedicated Gentoo based distribution for that laptop. You don't even need to put portage on the laptop, just use emerge on somewhere else to build packages for it. Emerge will take care of cross-compiling, etc..
As simple as I can put it, think on it as a Box with a repository-toolchain capable of building packages for *other* Box, while still keeping track of package updates and dependencies.
NOTE: A "full install" of Gentoo is not required for building gentoo based distros, you can setup a Gentoo chroot (you only want portage and emerge afterall, don't you?) on your debian/fedora/whetever box, or even setup a Gentoo prefix on MacOSX.
for workgroups
Because he can?
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.
No, your hardware has become that obsolete.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
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
Apparently not
But obviously he can't, he has to ask /. - and therefore he won't...
Go for NetBSD instead.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If so, I'd have a look at LTSP. At work we're re-purposing a bunch of old thin clients at our branch offices to PXE boot into a modern Ubuntu server. The setup is very easy under Debian/Ubuntu and you'll get a modern OS on every screen.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have to also agree with some other people that suggest getting a newer laptop, at least one with a CD drive.
Or at least a network card that supports PXE-boot.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Not really. Make sure the parts are disposed of properly, and buy something with more power for $100 that actually uses significantly less power, so if it's used for a decent amount of time, the power cost dwarfs the cost of the hardware.
The time saved would be more than worth the $30-$40, unless the person asking the question is completely broke.
That seems like the high end of the cost curve to me too. 5-6 months ago I was drowning in free Pentium 3 laptops that I picked up from the junk pile at work, to the point that I had to give most of them away for recycling/resale by the recycling company just because I knew I was never going to make effective use of another eight of them beyond the three I'd already found purposes for (in-car navigation for long drives, portable computer/oscilloscope, and portable audio editor/spare web-browsing system).
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
With Ask Slashdot, you get a bit deeper than you can on a mere google search.
Plus, you get peer reviewed statements vetted by each other's karma, something you can't get on google.
Depends on how much you value your time. My time is worth more to me than trying to fiddle with an underpowered secondhand PC. If you're just tinkering that's one thing, but vintage hardware is going to disappoint for any "real" use.
The first computer I bought with my own money was a P75. We throw away P3's at work. We're throwing away HP DL320's and moving them all to VM's.
"It's dead, Jim".
I think when an iPod Touch or modern smartphone has more power than your computer, you can't really call what you have a "computer" in the modern sense of the word. Hell I bought a new iPhone 3GS today for $100 -- at that price point it's a disposable item.
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.
However, it's still pointless to do what the submitter is attempting. 486 machines weren't even interesting targets 9 years ago. Any recent version of Fedora won't boot on a 486, since Fedora is now compiled for i686 and up. Even if you got it to boot, it would be too slow for a modern X, and nearly too slow even for a console.
The only modern-day task that a 486 machine can still perform acceptably is IP routing. Most people still have "slow" (by networking standards) DSL or cable connections. An old machine is perfectly capable of handling such speeds. But it's still a very bad idea. Energy costs are so high these days that buying a new low-power router machine is much cheaper than running a 486 even in the medium term (1-2 years), and the new machine will be much more capable and featureful. For $99 you can get a SheevaPlug which comes with Ubuntu and consumes 5 watts.
If I was setting up a 486 machine anyway, my distribution of choice would be Voyage Linux. Voyage is just a very small Debian Lenny installation with a few additional (small) packages for embedded environments. It doesn't ship as an ext2 image, but rather as a tarball that you untar, which is just as good. The kernel is compiled for 486, so (unlike Fedora) it will actually boot. In theory, you can apt-get anything in the Debian repositories (including X, GNOME, etc.), but in practice it won't work on a 486. There are just too many differences between modern X11R7.5 and contemporary versions to the 486 like X11R5 or X11R6. I've done this before, and I can tell you that you won't be happy with the GUI even if you get it to run.
A lot of commenters have suggested running an old distribution. This is a bad idea on any machine that you plan to connect to the internet. Even if there's a firewall in between, old versions of Linux have so many security holes that they represent an unacceptable risk. Old Linux versions are just as insecure as old Windows versions. Don't make the spambot problem worse. As a side note, distributions that provide no mechanism for in-place security upgrades are also insecure. This rules out most mini-distros like DSL or Puppy Linux.
Basically, there's no way to run X securely on such old hardware. Just forget about it. If you intend to use it as a text terminal, then it might be worth setting up. Even then, don't leave it on all the time, or your electricity bill will dwarf any savings. (If you're not paying for the electricity, still, do the rest of us a favor, and save the planet from global warming or something.)
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
Please turn in your geek card on your way out the door.
If you don't understand why he would want to make use of existing hardware, then Slashdot really isn't the web site for you.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Because he doesn't want to be wasteful? Because it's fun and interesting. Because he is of limited means? Because he enjoys a challenge? Because he lives in the third world? Because he's sending it to someone who's dirt poor or retarded or a charity? Put down the Wii and try to think.
I guess they don't sell dictionaries at flee-markets.
Coincidentally, there are software dictionaries that will work on his machine.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
And how do I get that $100?
Also, using old hardware is fun.
SRSLY the hardware in question was state of the art in 1994, which was when I bought a spiffy new DX266 instead of a then-dodgy P75. If you think 2009-1994=20 then I suspect you're using one of those dodgy early Pentiums.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
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
I'm in general agreement with the "that's WAY to old to be worthwhile" crowd here but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and ask "resurrect for what purpose?" There are very few thing that can truly be done with a 486 in 2009:
So really, yeah, I can see there are things you can do, and I can appreciate not wanting to waste something, but I just can't see anything really worthwhile that could be done with this hardware outside of single-purpose stuff like a dumb terminal, recipe database, weather station, etc. Only worth pursuing if you have lots of spare time or just really love to tinker of the sake of tinkering.
Also: even though it's a laptop, I can't imagine the battery is any good, and replacements are probably hard to find by now, so it'll either be stationary, or portable to the extent that you can go anywhere as long as you're within 10 feet of a power outlet. So I can't see you taking this thing to coffeeshops or conferences or anything. If you have a particular goal you want to reach--say you love taking notes in vi and want something you can take to conferences--then you'd be better off getting a newer unit with wireless and a decent battery.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Why would someone want to spend his free time making use of extremely old and obsolete hardware when much newer hardware is cheaply available and there are useful and relevant things that can be done with modern software on newer hardware?
Many people have a higher opinion of the value of their time than your employer. I, however, get paid well, often enough, precisely because I'm good at fiddling with underpowered secondhand PCs...
Sure, it takes a bit more time and effort to get a nice, clean, tuned and optimized installation, rather than instal and run at startup every bit of unnecessary crap software on the planet. But compare the cost of a used Pentium-2 PC in quantities, with bulk trucking rates, to that of a nice new system... (Hmm... $50 vs $300) and then multiply that across 1,000 stations. Then consider just how much horsepower you really need to run that terminal emulator and a couple simple business apps written 15 years ago...
Yes, at a quarter-million USD, the price difference is certainly enough to pay even a very highly-paid IT pro for a full YEAR of "tinkering". Never mind a small horde of PC Techs.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Hell it's probably the spec for a Panasonic Toughbook for all we know. Gorgeous on the outside, and it'll take a bullet for you. No net? Talk about a secure motherf***er...
He can smoke cigarettes, have a permanent 5 o'clock shadow, and can claim KGB credentials.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I put this on a 15 yo toshiba satellite pro (p75, 40MB ram, 750MB hd), works fine.
Getting wireless from a pcmcia card took a little work.
The CD rom, which is a custom toshiba thing, worked fine which was pretty impressive.
Ofcourse once the itch to get everything running was satisfied, it just sits on a shelf now..:)
http://www.delilinux.de/
I make that amount of money in half a day, but I'm not about to just throw something away that it took me half a day to earn. That's a somewhat significant amount of labor.
Also, comparing income levels like you are is misleading at best. I make $35k/year, which I've heard people refer to as being fairly poor, but due to the low cost of living in this area, it's a respectable salary. Looking at the absolute numbers doesn't give you the whole picture.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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/