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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?"

11 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 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.
  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. Re:Try Debian by hackersass · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  6. The problem with old distros is old browsers by harlows_monkeys · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  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:seriously? by shentino · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.