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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.
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
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
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.
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 ----
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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