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Comments: 507 +- Ask Slashdot: Installing Linux On Old Hardware? on Friday October 30, @05:18PM
Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday October 30, @05:18PM
from the where-are-those-old-telegraph-drivers dept.
from the where-are-those-old-telegraph-drivers dept.
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linux
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?"
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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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Older than it needs to be. I ran Slackware 4 (just about contemporary with Redhat 6.0) on a laptop with lower specs than that, no problem.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Slackware was one of the great floppy-loadable distros. I don't think they break it up into floppy-sized chunks any more, but I remember all the fun of trying to install Slackware 3-point-something from floppies. The biggest problem was that HD floppies were sufficiently unreliable that I was constantly re-writing floppy disks on another machine.
Also, Slackware was good for making minimal installs. In particular, Red Hat tried to install and enable EVERYTHING. There were so many buffer-overrun bugs (at lea
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually it's not hard to set up slackware or even debian to do a netboot install.
If it has a network card you can configure them to do a netboot.
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]
Parent
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'd recommend against svgalib. Their site is down, and there hasn't been a release in ages.
The problem with old dist vers / DSL etc.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Parent
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.
Re:Older Distros (Score:5, Interesting)
Or a current BSD distribution. On old hardware I typically install netbsd. I have tried Minix but the hardware compatibility is not good.
Parent
Re:Older Distros (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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]
Try Debian (Score:3, Interesting)
Older versions of Debian supported floppy installs. The last time I tried it (with etch I think) I had some issues that annoyed me and the response I got is that nobody on the dev. team wanted to suffer with a kernel image that doesn't have the kitchen sink loaded so they crippled/dropped floppy install support. Still once you have an older system running it is trivial to upgrade if you have some connectivity.
Re:Try Debian (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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.
Parent
Not technically Linux but... (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with old distros is old browsers (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.
Put the drive in another machine... (Score:5, Insightful)
...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.
486MHz? You mean an Intel 486? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:486MHz? You mean an Intel 486? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Linux Isn't Bloated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I know I'll go to hell for this, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
So 15 is 20 now? (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe Gentoo? Read 1st before modding down. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Parent
3.11 (Score:5, Funny)
for workgroups
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Has Linux really become that bloated? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless you *have* to have linux.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Go for NetBSD instead.
LTSP, if the PCMCIA card supports PXEBOOT (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: A rare item. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:too old (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently not
Parent
Re:too old (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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 navig
Re:too old (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
I have to also agree with some other people that suggest getting a newer laptop, at least one with a CD drive.
Or at least a network card that supports PXE-boot.
Re:seriously? (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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
However, it's still pointless to do what the submitter is attempting. 486 machines weren't even interesting targets 9 years ago. Any recent version of Fedora won't boot on a 486, since Fedora is now compiled for i686 and up. Even if you got it to boot, it would be too slow for a modern X, and nearly too
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I guess they don't sell dictionaries at flee-markets.
Coincidentally, there are software dictionari
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
And how do I get that $100?
Also, using old hardware is fun.