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?"

Change hardware...

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to get rid of that hardware, or dump it in your own personal museum...

Re:Try Debian

[hackersass]

Once upon a time Debian used to have a network install that you could boot to with removable media (may have only been CD instead of floppy) and then tell it you wanted to install the rest of the OS from the network. Did a couple of installs this way and it worked pretty well. This was probably 7-years ago. Not sure if this is still available or not.

Have you looked at...

[stakovahflow]

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

WHY would you do this?

[xiando]

I barely got passed "486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM" when this obvious question popped into my mind: WHY WOULD YOU EVER CONSIDER INSTALLING ANYTHING ON THIS HARDWARE? Throw it out the window and visit the local flee-markets. You can get something as new Pentium3-based laptops for the price of a cup of coffee there these days. Better laptops also tend to lie in piles on recycling points, perhaps you can grab a few better laptops if you go deliver yours there. Perhaps you have some special loving relationship to this hardware, if so then put it in a frame or something and install GNU/Linux on something else. Seriously. That hardware is just not worth the time and trouble unless you are making a museum exhibit of some kind. I realize that this does not help with your original question, I just felt compelled to point out the obvious.

Put the drive in another machine...

[John Hasler]

...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.

Linux Isn't Bloated

[zx2c4]

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.

I know I'll go to hell for this, but...

[R2.0]

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.

Bloated? Not a fair accusation

[Philodoxx]

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.

Maybe Gentoo? Read 1st before modding down.

[miknix]

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.

Has Linux really become that bloated?

[jim_v2000]

No, your hardware has become that obsolete.

Re:too old

[dna_(c)(tm)(r)]

But obviously he can't, he has to ask /. - and therefore he won't...

Re:3.11

[oatworm]

Pfft. Why do that when he can run something more secure and network-aware, like NT 3.51 or OS/2 Warp? *whistles in the dark*

Re:To not create garbage.

[FlyingBishop]

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.

Re:too old

[blincoln]

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).

Re:seriously?

[shentino]

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.

Re:WHY would you do this?

[Anonymous Coward]

a 486 is not an old bw tv from the 50s. a 486 is really a crt tv (not even flat screen!) from the 80's. a piece of junk, not old enough to invest time just for nostalgia's sake, not new enough to be even remotely useful. it's just a piece of junk.

Re:WHY would you do this?

[adolf]

WHY WOULD YOU EVER CONSIDER INSTALLING ANYTHING ON THIS HARDWARE?

Because they can, not because it's useful. Though it could be: I used to have a multi-user Linux box running Slackware and plugged into a lightly-used T1 (which was pretty fast, back then). It served mail, HTTP, DNS, ran an IRC server, and multiple shell sessions for half a dozen folks at once. 'Twas a 25MHz 486 with 24 megs of RAM and a few hundred megs of disk.

It worked great. For years and years. And it'd work just as well these days, doing similar things.

I once picked up a couple of DEC VT330 terminals in good condition for a few bucks each, and plugged them into my desktop machine. Why? Because I could.

Not too many years ago, I scrounged an old XT, which had one 5.25" floppy drive, no hard drive, integrated 10base-2 Ethernet, and monochrome graphics. I ran MS-DOS on it, with a resident(!) FTP server to get data back and forth, and had telnet and a few other basic networking tools working just great. Just because I could.

It's really no different than hacking an SD card [powco.net] into your WRT54 router. Or teaching your TI graphing calculator to play Tetris. Or playing chess. Or softball. Or any other thing that seems totally boring to some folks, but which regardless is interesting enough to be rewarding to the person who is actually doing it.

Re:too old

[Reaperducer]

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.

Re:Linux Isn't Bloated

[Lumpy]

Ok Slackware. I can netboot install it. I can embed it on tiny stuff. Whole OS on a single floppy with busybox.

Also I can make it work on a 386. you know you are allowed to recompile the kernel to take out all that you dont want. In fact anyone that wants to run a fast machine typically does that.

Re:WHY would you do this?

[Reaperducer]

WHY WOULD YOU EVER CONSIDER INSTALLING ANYTHING ON THIS HARDWARE?

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.

Throw it out the window and visit the local flee-markets.

I guess they don't sell dictionaries at flee-markets.
Coincidentally, there are software dictionaries that will work on his machine.

Re:Bloated? Not a fair accusation

[Anonymous Coward]

there isn't fundamentally anything more difficult about modern hardware management than 20 year old hardware.
some of its easier, some of it more messy due to hot swap

but none of that install space or memory usage is going towards hardware management. it is* all basically bloat.
just try* to trim down a distribution small enough that it doesn't want to pull in gtk

Re:too old

[nxtw]

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?

Re:Bloated? Not a fair accusation

[rastos1]

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.

It certainly became bloated when KDE 4.3.2 comes with Akonadi that requires 100MB of disk space to hold an empty adressbook and a to-do list. [kde.org] You can turn it off, but it comes back when some app asks for it. In 90% of cases the functionality can be replaced with:

new entry: echo "John Smith, Main St. 25, Los Angeles, 0904-666555" >> ~/.contacts
search: grep -i "smith" ~/.contacts

Re:too old

[bigstrat2003]

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.