Installing Linux On Old Hardware? 507
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?"
When you have a machine from that era... (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.
Older Distros (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.
Damn Small Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Personal Experince (Score:5, Informative)
Well, not hard to find... (Score:5, Informative)
A Trove of these things:
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/ [linuxlinks.com]
Promising:
http://atomic.eyedropvideo.com/remote1.shtml [eyedropvideo.com]
Non-X woth graphical browsing:
http://blueflops.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Not technically Linux but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Try Debian (Score:5, Informative)
486MHz? You mean an Intel 486? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WHY would you do this? (Score:2, Informative)
Agreed. Sometimes though, it's fun to do something "just because". A lot of people doing this have dug up dad's old work laptop out of the attic/basement during fall break and are desperately looking for something to do. In high school, getting linux running on any sort of ancient mobile device gives you serious geek cred. I remember back in high school some guy had found (and got working!) and TRS-80 portable that ran on something like 15 D cell batteries, and could dial home to his linux box using it. I had a laptop I attempted installing Deli linux on. It seems the main problem with these older computers is finding working floppy drives. But when you're 15, broke, single, and a nerd, you make do with the hardware you have.
That said, there is some incredible server hardware (like you said, P3 and above) 1 and 2U rackmount servers with dual processors on craigslist for less than $120 usually. This is in Dallas, YMMV.
Re:486MHz? You mean an Intel 486? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Try Debian (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [debian.org]
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.
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:5, Informative)
DSM Damn Small Linux fits in 16meg
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ [damnsmalllinux.org]
How About FreeBSD? (Score:2, Informative)
Seconded (Score:5, Informative)
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 [gentoo-wiki.com] for details on how to do a lot of specialized things.
Re: A rare item. (Score:3, Informative)
deja vu (Score:1, Informative)
hey i went thru this a few months ago. a laptop w/ a 100 mhz pentium 1, 24 MB of SDRAM in a non some weird looking non SODIMM format. about a 500mb of hard drive space, a singular modular bay with a floppy drive module, an extended battery module, and a cdrom module. serial, parallel, and pcmcia slot but no usb. It came w/ a pcmcia 802.11b wifi adapter but no ethernet adaptor.
I tried ubuntu 9.04, tomsrbt, dsl, and puppy. funny enough i had the most luck w/ ubuntu. It was the most hardware compatible and i was able to perform a bare minimal console only install. it would boot up and i could log in but it only had a few KB of memory free so trying to do much of anything would send it thrashing. I dont really remeber what the issue w/ puppy was but tomsrbt and dsl both there were hardware compatibility issues that kept me from installing.
After I got bored with it, I tried unsuccessfully to give it away so it eventually found its way into the dumpster.
Slackware (Score:1, Informative)
Runs on 486s, still.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:too old (Score:1, Informative)
Some times you don't need anything more powerful.
Plus that $30 or $40 is still money out the door, then you have to spend time looking, finding and then getting (ie picking up) the new hardware.
If you have hardware that works, why bother upgrading?
Re:How About FreeBSD? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Seconded (Score:2, Informative)
(It's actually not trivial to truly cross-compile a dist between architectures last I checked,
Indeed.
While most packages build fine as-is, a lot just fail to cross-compile due common stupid things totally unrelated to the source code (libtool and pkg-config I'm looking at you). Problems also show up due to badly written/generated configure and Makefile scripts (I don't blame package authors though because autotools are complex).
My point is that it is currently very important to Gentoo to be able to cross-compile easily. For instance, we can see the in-portage cross-compiling working when:
* Distributed compiling with distcc. ..)
* Cross-compiling for x86 on x86_64.
* Generalized cross-compiling (gentoo-embedded: ARM, MIPS,
So, a lot of patches for successful cross-compiling are applied on the Gentoo tree everyday to make cross-compiling easy and thus, to make the above projects possible.
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:WHY would you do this? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:seriously? (Score:0, Informative)
That's gotta be one of the funniest things I've seen all day. And I've been reading this site for nearly 10 years.
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:3, Informative)
I'd recommend against svgalib. Their site is down, and there hasn't been a release in ages.
Re:Bloated? Not a fair accusation (Score:1, Informative)
Or go with a current Net- or OpenBSD for that more patched and secure experience. FreeBSD recommends at least 24MB of memory, so it might also fit, theoretically. A Linux distribution with a custom kernel and carefully selected userland could be a possibility as well, though it might require some extra work.
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:4, Informative)
Dead you say?
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ [damnsmalllinux.org]
The site is up, the forums are running, its stable.
Re:How About FreeBSD? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:3, Informative)
You can't install Gentoo unassisted on that machine: you can't fit both the Portage tree and the compile environment into 720MB, and 28MB of RAM requires the use of a great deal of swap. I'd do the following:
1) Partition the hard drive into a 250MB swap partition, a 20MB bootstrap partition, and a 450MB system partition /usr/portage, /var/tmp, and /tmp.
2) Install a floppy-era Linux on the bootstrap partition.
3) Using the bootstrap Linux to give you network access, mount network drives for
4) Install Gentoo using gcc-3.4 and an appropriately old glibc.
5) Install a lightweight DE and apps.
Steps 4 and 5 will take you about a week on the hardware mentioned. After that, routine upgrades will take no more than an hour or so.
Re:Older Distros (Score:5, Informative)
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:4, Informative)
You are an extremely rude person. Even if guides to install DSL in _exactly_ that situation like this [damnsmalllinux.org] were not so easy to find, anything you can copy to a Linux formatted hard disk from a Linux rescue floppy can generally be installed. DSL is a great candidate.
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:5, Informative)
Breadbox Ensemble? (Score:2, Informative)