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.
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.
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I also went with slackware. It worked great on a Celeron 500 (admittedly significantly faster than a 486 though) with fvwm or tab wm. I think it's best to go with a real distro with up-to-date libraries. He will have to not install a large portion of the packages but that may a little hairy getting in under 720MB though.
Slackware's minimal requirements: http://www.slackware.org/install/sysreq.php [slackware.org]
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]
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:4, Informative)
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Damn Small Linux is very convenient. I have an old ThinkPad from '97 with DSL. This allows me to connect it to the wireless network and run all my apps remotely from my main box. :)
Applications run faster that way than they do from the harddrive.
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:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When you have a machine from that era... (Score:5, Informative)
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No. No, I usually don't answer ACs. In this case I do, since I used to use DSL and came across Tiny Core via this post of yours, and downloaded it.
'No' is the answer to your suggestion, alas. It doesn't run in 32 MB of RAM, even. It simply panics the kernel. And the OP said '28 MB of RAM'. I increased the RAM to 128 and found it to boot fast as lightning, and consume around 36 MB (using 'top') by just being up. Alas, no.
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.
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Actually, all of those considerations aren't a big deal.
I installed Linux on a very old tablet, with no CDRom, Floppy, and it wouldn't boot to USB. The easy solution? I pulled the drive out. {sigh} I don't know why people don't think of that.
I started at about 10pm, so a parts run was out of the question. It was only a 20Gb drive, but in his case, I'd suggest buying a bigger drive. Maybe he can find one on eBay that'll work in it. Otherwise, he can do a co
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
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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.
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If this is the best solution, it's too bad, isn't it? Surely there has been all kinds of developments and innovation and enablement and whatnot over the years that doesn't require more computing power - ideas that are new and better, not just more of the same?
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Debian used to work well on older systems, but I wouldn't say that these days. Two years ago, Debian on a Pentium 75 was usable with a minimal install, and would fit on a 400MB hard drive. Those days are long gone. I'm about to replace my two Pentium systems with Pentium III, which rankles my sensibilities since I see that as major overkill for a simple firewall and a DNS/DHCP/IRC server.
OpenBSD might be a better choice, actually. It runs on minimal systems and uses very little disk space, so he would b
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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
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.
Re:Older Distros (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
"Or a current BSD distribution. On old hardware I typically install netbsd. I have tried Minix but the hardware compatibility is not good."
I agree with this. I'm not sure what the philosophy is, but Linux distros seem to throw away knowledge like it was candy. I recently attempted to install Ubuntu on a nice 2000-era laptop. Ubunto apparently doesn't know how to talk to the controller and/or write to the hard drive. I installed FreeBSD 7.2 instead.
A.
Damn Small Linux (Score:2, Informative)
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Its far from limited in my experience.
I have used it when traveling visiting etc and don't want to drag a laptop. Boot from a thumb drive in any library.
It has everything you need for every day use.
DSL (Score:2)
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]
A rare item. (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're lucky and can actually find it , QNX had a whole distro on a floppy. :)
It was intended as a demo , but had full features like file browsing and some net.
That might be able to boot the machine. But frankly , i know of no other distro
still able to boot and install via a floppy.This will prove interresting to follow.
Im just as eager to find out as you
Happy hacking
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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.
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.
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Re:Try Debian (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.
Damn Small Linux (Score:2)
Have you tried Damn Small Linux [damnsmalllinux.org] It sounds like exactly what you want. It will run on a 486 with 16MB of RAM, and 50MB harddrive. It runs X, Dillo is included, and has several install methods available, not just live disks.
Voyage Linux! (Score:2, Redundant)
Use Voyage Linux!
It's a stripped down Debian that's designed to run on embedded devices, and run entirely in RAM. It keeps Debian's APT package manager for super easy installation. Only 128MB or disk space (tiny base install) required for the base install. I use this distro on my PC Engines Alix board for a audiophile USB music server.
In regards yo getting it installed, you can either take out the HD and do the install on another machine or beg-borrow/steal a PCMCIA USB adapter.
If you use X, I would recomme
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Ooops. Sorry, I got really excited replying to your post. I love it when people try to recycle old hardware with Linux..
Voyage Linux: http://linux.voyage.hk/ [voyage.hk]
dvtm: http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/ [brain-dump.org]
Not technically Linux but... (Score:3, Informative)
too old (Score:2)
a 486? Why on earth would you bother? Even a p3 laptop is pretty obsolete these days, but still can be had for under 30 or 40 dollars on craigslist. That would be a quantum leap above the 486 you are planning on using.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Because he can?
Re:too old (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently not
Re:too old (Score:4, Insightful)
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Hell it's probably the spec for a Panasonic Toughbook for all we know. Gorgeous on the outside, and it'll take a bullet for you. No net? Talk about a secure motherf***er...
He can smoke cigarettes, have a permanent 5 o'clock shadow, and can claim KGB credentials.
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Many people have a higher opinion of the value of their time than your employer. I, however, get paid well, often enough, precisely because I'm good at fiddling with underpowered secondhand PCs...
Sure, it takes a bit more time and effort to get a nice, clean, tuned and optimized installation, rather than instal and run at startup every bit of unnecessary crap software on the planet. But compare the cost of a used Pentium-
There are more than enough small distros around (Score:2)
Damn Small Linux and Tiny Core Linux being some of the obvious choices. Your real problem is getting things booted in the first place. I wonder whether gPXE is able to see your PCMCIA network card. If it did, you could just boot that off of a floppy and from there it would be a pretty simple task to netinstatll something; if not, well I'm pretty sure DSL has a set of floppies still. You could also try installing Slackware 9, which I think was the last version to ship a floppy set -- just install the very ba
Have you looked at... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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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)
It works, but it takes work (Score:2)
Linux Isn't Bloated (Score:3, Insightful)
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I tried to help out someone who had a Thinkpad T600e (Pentium II, 128MB RAM) and wanted to use it
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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)
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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:
Ask Slashdot Strikes Again! (Score:2)
Seriously, why? If your goal is to run dillo and a couple of xterms, pick up an old p3 laptop. People are throwing them away. If you want to do it as a "fun" project, why Ask Slashdot? Is not half the fun in figuring it out?
As someone who used to run linux on a 486 (and a 386), I can tell you that you aren't going to do any usable web browsing in X in 28megs of ram. Those are lynx specs.
You can actually do some interesting/useful things in linux with that hardware, but graphical web browsing isn't going to
tagged "pointless" (Score:2)
MS-DOS and LoopyNES (Score:2)
Throw MS-DOS and LoopyNES on it. Get some decent NES gaming running on that thing.
No$GMB also works at that kind of slow speed.
DSL (Score:2)
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.
Re: (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:
* Distribut
3.11 (Score:5, Funny)
for workgroups
I beg your pardon! (Score:2)
DESQview! [chsoft.com]
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Network install? (Score:2)
I'm not sure anymore, but I know older versions of Mandriva (Well, Mandrake - try to find 9.2 or earlier) could boot from a floppy and install over the network. I installed directly from a mirror a couple times back in the day. Worth looking into. I believe carroll.cac.psu.edu still has the files for older Mandrake distros.
How About FreeBSD? (Score:2, Informative)
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Has Linux really become that bloated? (Score:4, Insightful)
Knoppix? (Score:2)
I've used Knoppix in the past (the CD image) and it had an hd-install option that would put itself on the harddrive. You would be able to tell if X works using just the live CD then decide if you want to install.
[url:http://www.knoppix.org/]
[url:http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Hd_Install_HowTo]
Fedora/CentOS LiveCDs do contain native extX fsimg (Score:2)
While probably not a solution to the original problem, an answer to the specific question about native ext2 images instead of LiveCD iso images is this-
The Fedora and CentOS LiveCDs do contain a native ext3/4 filesystem image embedded within a squashfs image. The normal Fedora anaconda/liveinst installer works by copying this image directly to the target destination then using resize2fs to expand it to the destination's size.
My ZyX-LiveInstaller at http://filteredperception.org/ [filteredperception.org] goes one further and does t
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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
Gone are the floppy net installs. (Score:2)
I have a useless think pad that for a time was my picture server. I used redhat and booted a floppy and then used a driver floppy for my NIC. This let me install just what I needed from a server over the internet. I killed the RPM database for some reason I don't recall and could NOT find anyone who catered to boot floppy installs. Granted I could have fought and beaten on it and a local PC to do it but I gave up and used another junk one with a CD in it to install Damn Small Linux. It's clean and it's cool
Unless you *have* to have linux.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Go for NetBSD instead.
LTSP, if the PCMCIA card supports PXEBOOT (Score:3, Interesting)
DSL (DAMM SMALL LINUX) (Score:2)
LTSP / VNC / XDMCP Similar "Dump Terminal" Option (Score:2)
Using anything other than the most very basic console will be painful on a machine that old. Someone suggested using older software, but that won't be very fun, since the web will be practically useless on an old browser.
i have a Toshiba from that era that I have used as a dumb terminal on and off over the years. At one point I had gui-less version of linux, with a frame buffer version of vnc and used it to connect to my main machine. It was fast and served well as a bed side web browser for years. At a
way back in the day (Score:2)
Way back in the day I used to browse the web on an IBM 8086 with 640k of ram, using something similar to Lynx. I know there are versions out there for DOS so a 486 should be plenty. Not sure though how well they handle the web code on more "modern" sites crapped up with php, flash and css.
I have a slightly better machine (Score:2)
It's a Pentium-90 with 64MB of EDO DRAM. Thing runs Damn Small Linux really well, but it's got rather more RAM than you do. Might be worth a shot if your BIOS supports booting from a CD -- the very last BIOS update for my box enabled that. You'll also need a junker 40x (ish) CD-ROM drive: the 6x drive this thing had originally wouldn't support booting either. I can even run Firefox 2.0 on this; takes 20-30 seconds to start up, and the redraws are slow, but it works a lot better than you'd think. Dillo'
My $.02 (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm in general agreement with the "that's WAY to old to be worthwhile" crowd here but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and ask "resurrect for what purpose?" There are very few thing that can truly be done with a 486 in 2009:
So really, yeah, I can see there are things you can do, and I can appreciate not wanting to waste something, but I just can't see anything really worthwhile that could be done with this hardware outside of single-purpose stuff like a dumb terminal, recipe database, weather station, etc. Only worth pursuing if you have lots of spare time or just really love to tinker of the sake of tinkering.
Also: even though it's a laptop, I can't imagine the battery is any good, and replacements are probably hard to find by now, so it'll either be stationary, or portable to the extent that you can go anywhere as long as you're within 10 feet of a power outlet. So I can't see you taking this thing to coffeeshops or conferences or anything. If you have a particular goal you want to reach--say you love taking notes in vi and want something you can take to conferences--then you'd be better off getting a newer unit with wireless and a decent battery.
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RAM : 128 MB physical RAM for releases since version 1.0.2 or failing that a Linux swap file and/or swap partition is required for all included applications to run; 64 MB for releases previous to 1.0.2
Re: (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 h
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.
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: (Score:2)
So says someone named after a game from 1972.
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.