Slashdot Mirror
Can You Install Linux On a 1993 PC? (yeokhengmeng.com)
Slashdot reader yeokm1 writes: The oldest x86 CPU that the Lnux kernel supports today is theoretically the 486. However is this theory actually true in practice? I decided to put this theory to the test in my project.
His site describes installing Gentoo Linux on an "ancient" IBM PS/1 Consultant 2133 19C (released in 1993), with 64MB SIMM-72 RAM. (Though to speed things up, he compiled that minimal version of Gentoo on a modern Thinkpad T430 released in 2012.) "Due to the age of the PC, the BIOS only supports booting from the floppy drive or internal HDD," so there was also some disk partitioning and kernel configuration. ("Must disable 64-bit kernel for obvious reasons!") A half-hour video shows that it takes almost 11 minutes just to boot up -- and five and a half minutes to shut down. "Despite the many roadblocks I faced, I was impressed by the level of support Linux has for ancient hardware like this."
And there's one more added bonus. "Given the age of the 486 (1989 technology), it does not support branch prediction... Ironically this makes it safe from the Meltdown and Spectre attacks."
His site describes installing Gentoo Linux on an "ancient" IBM PS/1 Consultant 2133 19C (released in 1993), with 64MB SIMM-72 RAM. (Though to speed things up, he compiled that minimal version of Gentoo on a modern Thinkpad T430 released in 2012.) "Due to the age of the PC, the BIOS only supports booting from the floppy drive or internal HDD," so there was also some disk partitioning and kernel configuration. ("Must disable 64-bit kernel for obvious reasons!") A half-hour video shows that it takes almost 11 minutes just to boot up -- and five and a half minutes to shut down. "Despite the many roadblocks I faced, I was impressed by the level of support Linux has for ancient hardware like this."
And there's one more added bonus. "Given the age of the 486 (1989 technology), it does not support branch prediction... Ironically this makes it safe from the Meltdown and Spectre attacks."
The big loss is that Firefox and Chromium no longer work on pre SSE2
Firefox works on ARM which has no SSE2.
Is this about the precompiled binaries?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
> Systemd...
Gentoo Linux uses OpenRC by default. You have to go out of your way to install systemd.
Check 102 seconds into the video. You can clearly see the string "OpenRC 0.34.11 is starting up Gentoo Linux (i486)"
Prior to that we can see that it takes the kernel nearly 14 seconds to pass control to init.
Actually, watch the video. You get a really good sense of which services take an unreasonable amount of time to start. (Under ordinary circumstances, OpenRC doesn't need to regenerate its service dependence cache, so his next boot will shave a couple of minutes off of the start time we see in this video.)
The big loss is that Firefox and Chromium no longer work on pre SSE2 processors so you can't surf the modern web on old computers anymore.
This is simply not true. Firefox builds just fine on a PIII here, using gentoo. You just need an ffmpeg that's built without SSE2.
Chromium won't build on a PIII, but that's not because of SSE2, but because you need at least 2 GB RAM to link it.