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Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier tests several
Linux distributions on an old, under-powered Pentium II PC.
"It's worth mentioning that Linux is also a great option for putting
old non-x86 hardware to use. I have a few old Sun UltraSPARC 10 machines
with 256MB of RAM that run Debian Linux just fine. I also have an old,
green iMac that runs Debian and other PowerPC distros well enough -- but
Windows isn't an option for those machines at all. If you want to make the
best of old hardware, processor speed is much less important than RAM for
Linux. If you can't afford a new machine, but can afford to max out your
RAM, you'll see much better performance. I wouldn't recommend running a
Linux desktop with less than 64MB of RAM, and 128MB is enough for most
applications."
(Log in to post comments)
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 24, 2006 23:05 UTC (Fri) by s_cargo (guest, #10473) [Link] I'm not surprised that he found Firefox and Mozilla to be so slow. I have an even older box that has Netscape 4.74 and 7.2 on it. NS 4.74 is crisp and quick while NS 7.2 is a barely usable slow pig.If I point both browsers to the same web page and try to save anything from the page (an image or the page itself) 4.74 blows 7.2 out of the water. When I save something from 4.74, the file selection window pops up, I click save, then the download progress window quickly pops up then closes, and the image/page has been saved in the wink of an eye. When I try the same thing with NS 7.2 it takes several seconds for the file selection window to appear, then after clicking to save the file it is 15-20 seconds before the progress window appears. That's no typo; 15-20 *seconds*. It is absurd that it takes so long to manage that window. It gets even more ridiculous when clicking on a link to a PDF file. In NS 7.2, the PDF file is often finished downloading and I'm already *reading* it in Acrobat Reader when the stupid NS 7.2 download progress window finally appears. Yup, it often takes less time to download the file, start up acroread, and display the PDF file, than it takes for NS 7.2 to put up the download progress window. On newer and faster machines, you wouldn't notice how badly the newer version performs, but the older hardware makes it glaringly obvious.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 2:29 UTC (Sat) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link] I've noticed the same things. I used to use a 386/33 with 32 megs of ram for a workstation,and it was noticeably faster doing most things than Windows had been on the same machine. Yet supposedly that hardware is no longer adequate for performing the exact same tasks I was doing then?
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 14:53 UTC (Sat) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link] that hardware is no longer adequate for performing the exact same tasks I was doing then?Nope. Not if you're willing to use the exact same software you were using then. The same old software will still run the same way on the same old hardware. It's when you want to run newer versions of things, versions that have improved in all sorts of ways (some of which you may not care about if, eg., any non-English, let alone non-Western, language is irrelevant to you; or if you never view any sites that rely upon current standard XHTML and CSS to control their layout) that you'll find they may not be a good match for your same old hardware. Of course the problem is that you don't really want to do things exactly the same way you were doing them then. You may not care about some, or even most, of the things that have changed, but you want to use the newer versions of programs for doing the exact same tasks. But they do more than that, and of course there's a price to be paid for that. This is nothing new. This same inflation has been going on in pretty much the same way since the days when 640KB of RAM really did seem as though it ought to be more than enough for anything you might want to do, and a 20MB hard disk was almost unthinkably vast. And that wasn't even so very long ago...
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 26, 2006 4:19 UTC (Sun) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link] I want the later versions for basically one reason - security fixes.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 27, 2006 8:38 UTC (Mon) by primorec (guest, #2740) [Link] My company (+5000 employees) replaces every 3-4 years ALL MS WINDOWS based desktops with a new generation hardware. MS WINDOWS based desktops are mostly used by marketing, sales and management people. Why do they need 3.6GHz PC with 2GB RAM is beyond me. They run MS EXCEL + WORD + EMAIL + WEB browsing. The engineering part of the company uses RHEL 3.0 and a few SUN boxes.So, what did I accomplish ? I've equipped, in the last 2-3 years, our lab with approx. 50-55 RH8 based workstations, which are used to run GPIB based equipment. One lab workstation was made, in average, out of two or three old and obsoleted PCs. I took hard disk + RAM from two or three PCs and assembled a third one. My initial lab workstations were based on Cyrix 187MHz CPU + 128MB RAM. They still run and do the work. Today I am putting together 400-700MHz PCs with 256-384MB RAM. All PCs run RH8 + XFCE desktop. Typical uptime is around 250-300 days. ALL workstations are connected to a LAN with one application/file server, which in the same time does NIS/YP + SAMBA. Users does not complain about the speed or about performance in general. In the last 2 years we did NOT buy a single new PC with MS WINDOWS installed and it seems that we will stay the same for the foreseeable future
SUMMARY:
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Mar 4, 2006 21:35 UTC (Sat) by emj (guest, #14307) [Link] Try running a terminal server with 4 users running flash games, then you will now why they need that much CPU.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 2:34 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link] XUL is, no doubt about it, a relatively heavy solution to the cross platform gui problem. That's where you're seeing your time go. Personally, I'm not a fan.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 6:20 UTC (Sat) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link] If it's the XUL interface then I'd expect, for instance, Galeon, would be much faster. I haven'ttried it in some time, but last I checked it wasn't.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 26, 2006 18:17 UTC (Sun) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] That it does not have one specific performance problem does not mean that it has no others.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 28, 2006 3:48 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] Gecko has some pretty big issues with how it stores image data: storing images decompressed in memory, storing some images on both the client and server, etc.
This is one of the reasons that having a large amount of memory improves Firefox's performance. It also points out a good place to focus efforts in reducing memory usage.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Mar 1, 2006 18:38 UTC (Wed) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link] If the difference is that large, I think you just have too little memoryso that the machine needs to swap and page memory pages all the time.
Silly question Posted Feb 24, 2006 23:48 UTC (Fri) by foo-bar (guest, #22971) [Link] But isn't it easier to buy a nice, fast and quite PC than to maintain all this ancient iron ??
Silly question Posted Feb 24, 2006 23:58 UTC (Fri) by abovett (subscriber, #13139) [Link] If you can afford and justify it, then yes, definitely - but not everyone can. Even todays relatively cheap PCs are still too expensive for some people, especially if you need several (e.g. a network for a non-profit group or charity). I'm still managing PCs of this vintage that are in regular use.
Andy B
Silly question Posted Feb 25, 2006 0:01 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link] if you are only needing one machine it very well may be, but if you are trying to support many machines (think non-profit orginization) the cost of buying all the new machines needed can be very high (plus, the non-profit has much better things to do with the money)
in addition, even if a new machine can paper over the problem, that's still resources that aren't available for other things. I for one useually have several things going on in the background and it would be nice to speed them up by having things like browsers eat fewer resources.
Silly question Posted Feb 25, 2006 1:32 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] For replacing aging windows 2000 or 98 installs I've found that IceWM works out nicely. It provides a nice familar interface for non-technical users, you can stick little icons on the taskbar for needed applications using the icepref configuration program.
XFE is a close clone to the Microsoft Explorer thing.. it's based off of the X Wincommander, which seems dead now.
The only very confusing thing is probably the virtual desktops. It'll make windows 'disapear', so that will take some getting used to or have that disabled or whatnot.
Silly question Posted Feb 25, 2006 9:30 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link] fvwm95 comes even closer :), and is extremely light. I used a P100 with 64MB RAM and fvwm95 on Slack as an extra X terminal for a while. Worked very well!
Silly question Posted Feb 25, 2006 3:34 UTC (Sat) by Ross (subscriber, #4065) [Link] Sadly, this isn't always something in your control. For example I use an old Ultra 10 at work. It's old and slow, but it's the only dedicated Linux desktop I have (primary desktops have to run Windows far various annoying reasons). I can't justify a purchase of another system just so I can have Linux running full-time. Thankfully I can dual boot, use cygwin, and use virtual systems on my Windows system -- but it's just not the same.
And yes, I've noticed that Netscape 4.x is many times faster than the newer browsers -- and only slightly more crash-prone. But I try not to use it for any external sites because it is a huge security problem.
I also noticed that the Adaptech SCSI driver only works for a few hundred MB of data before crashing 2.4 UltraSPARC kernels. :)
Silly question Posted Feb 25, 2006 14:10 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] But isn't it easier to buy a nice, fast and quite PC than to maintain all this ancient iron ??At work I refurbished an old HP workstation (PA-RISC inside @ 200 MHz) and loaded Debian sarge to use it as a server. Yes, it may be old and slow, but the hardware is still up and running after 10 years -- it is now a rock solid cvs and web server with uptimes in excess of 300 days, and with a high geek factor. Another possibility is to take that old PC and use it as a router, firewall or any other secondary role -- with a couple of network adapters and a switch, you may build a router far more robust than any commercial offerings, more configurable, and far cheaper. Even if you buy the shiny new system, don't discard the old one too fast.
Silly question Posted Feb 26, 2006 1:43 UTC (Sun) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] man_ls, it looks like you and I are part of the "Linux on everything" crowd. And that suits me just fine. I had to deal with HP hardware some years back. I knew Debian offered a port and would have loved to run Linux as opposed to HPUX. HPUX, though friendly, isn't my cup of tea.
Silly question Posted Feb 26, 2006 10:56 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] To be honest, about two years ago I was looking for a web server, and the only machine available at the time was the 1997 vintage HP Visualize B180L workstation. Debian sarge (testing at the time) had a port for PA-RISC and was very well suited to the machine; I even loaded KDE 3.2 at some point and it ran fine on its 180 MHz processor, though later I removed it since I would be controlling the server using SSH.I also tried this 1996 IBM RS/6000 43p-140 we had lying around; its interior was eerily similar to my old PowerMac 7500, no doubt because of their common PReP heritage. Sadly the hardware was much worse condition than the HP's (it made strange noises), and its firmware was horrible too. After booting several times from serial console or diskette I was fed up. In contrast, with the HP you just load the CD-ROM, started and installed, much like you do today. To be even more honest, the geek factor of all this hardware was very high: rescuing these machines from the dump was a big satisfaction. Then I rescued an old PII @ 400 MHz to use as a custom made firewall/router using two network adapters and an old hub; and finally a retiring PIII @ 800 MHz to use as a Java workstation/server. All of them with Debian, of course; all headless except for this last one which had icewm. We then had the core of a corporate network at a total cost of 0 ; uptime in excess of 300 days, zero intrussions, and it has been running smoothly since I left a year ago, with minimal maintenance by a colleague. Linux on everything, yeah. How can we not love GNU/Linux?
Silly question Posted Feb 26, 2006 20:18 UTC (Sun) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link] For routers one can buy things like an ASUS wL500G Deluxe and throw the OpenWRT distribution at it.5 switched network ports, WLAN, a 200MHz processor, 32MB RAM and two USB2 ports for external storage, an ISDN adapter for VoIP and so on...
And all that for 90 Euro and maybe 5 Watts of electical power and of course no noise whatsoever. The power savings alone should account for the little investment over an old PC in a year or so.
Silly question Posted Feb 25, 2006 14:40 UTC (Sat) by Azraell (guest, #36118) [Link] But isn't it easier to buy a nice, fast and quiet PC than to maintain all this ancient iron ??
I think there are FAR more important matters than "easyness" :
1- Money
And answering your question:
Silly question Posted Feb 25, 2006 16:12 UTC (Sat) by chel (guest, #11544) [Link] Just a few comments.
Money: I do have a number of old Mutia's. One I used as a server for backups. I replaced it with a Linksys NSLU2 costing about E 75,=. The Linksys only consumes a few Watt, most of it is in the display (4 Leds) I think.
World Preservation: Well I think those 14 year old 64 bit Alpha's should be preserved. For the time being I preserve my 5 Multia's without power switched on ...
Quiet: ... that is much quieter.
Geekness factor: Both the Linksys and the Multia do fine.
Silly question Posted Feb 26, 2006 1:39 UTC (Sun) by wildpossum (guest, #17744) [Link] Sometimes it's actually not easier.
My friend has an older laptop with a broken HD. He could buy a 3.5" HD or get a new laptop. Instead at my suggestion, he booted Puppy Linux on it and his daughter saves work to a flash drive. This works very well, the machine's batteries are dead anyway and it has to run off a power point so it's only used as a machine to edit the occasional file, export as RTF and continue on a Windows machine in school.
That was so easy to do that he's forgotten about his plan to get a new HD. So that's money saved which he can use elsewhere, hopefully to benefit his daughter. And old equipment delayed from going to the landfill, and an new laptop which doesn't have to be manufactured.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 1:11 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] I've installed Debian Stable on some older machines lately.
Some Dells.. 200mhz Pentium MMX machine with 64megs of RAM and 4 gig harddrive. I didn't bother with a 'Desktop install'. I just did normal minimal install and installed IceWM and a few other applications.
It was sorta-usefull. Firefox was unbearably slow, I used "links2 -g" for a graphical browser which was ok. I like having usefull key combos, but obviously incompatabilities with https websites and javascripting put quite a big limitation on what sort of places I could visit.
I used mostly xterms and ssh'ng arond to other machines and that was fine.
Later I mucked around with some old bits and peices I had aviable to me and built a very nice desktop machine. I copied over the install from one of hte older machines using netcat, tar, and a couple Knoppix cdroms, booted it up and was suprised on how fast it actually is.
It's a 550mhz Pentium 3 with 448 megs of 100mhz sdram on a 440bx motherboard and a 40GB 5400rpm Seagate harddrive. A very nice setup still.
Firefox is perfectly usable, I have a nice minimalist GUI filemanager that is usable (although I rarely use it). I would feel perfectly comfortable using this as my main computer for work-related activities. I've got firefox open with a few tabs with a kernel compile going on in the background and the CPU pegged at 100% and it's still snappy and I am sitting here with 328 megs of ram free! (by Gkrellm's estimation)
I think that it's the amount of ram that has the most significant impact on usability with these old machines.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 2:59 UTC (Sat) by bk (guest, #25617) [Link] There was a time when I was using a 90mHz Pentium laptop (with 24 or maybe 32 MB or RAM), and running GNOME 1.4 and the later Mozilla betas (0.9.6 or thereabout). Yes it was slow, but it was all I had so it was usable enough. Even then I remember Mozilla was better than Netscape 4.x. Believe it or not I actually compiled it from source on that machine.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Mar 8, 2006 20:53 UTC (Wed) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] There was a time when I was using a 90mHz Pentium laptop (with 24 or maybe 32 MB or RAM), and running GNOME 1.4 and the later Mozilla betas (0.9.6 or thereabout). Yes it was slow, but it was all I had so it was usable enough. Even then I remember Mozilla was better than Netscape 4.x.I still have a 75 MHz Pentium laptop with 16 MB RAM; I don't use it very often anymore (for obvious reasons), but it's still functional, and it runs both X and NN 4.x without too much of a struggle. NN 3.0x was friendlier, though, while Mozilla is Right Out. (libc5 support got dropped in the summer of 1998, as I recall.) To be honest, though, it's more useful as a DOS game machine... Believe it or not I actually compiled it from source on that machine. Now that's ballsy. ;-) Greg
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 2:04 UTC (Sat) by jwb (guest, #15467) [Link] An option not mentioned here is to use a Linux distribution of approximately the same age as the computer. These will naturally be tailored to the capabilities that were common at the time. That's why I still use an ancient Red Hat Linux on my Multia, with a few updates to the kernel and the installation of iptables it's perfectly capable of fulfilling its role on my network.
So if you have an old 486/33 with 16MB of memory, try TAMU or SLS or Yggdrasil or something like that :)
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 6:25 UTC (Sat) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link] The first problem with that is those distros will no longer be kept up to date with securitypatches.
And it shouldn't be necessary. If I install an up to date distro, but with the lighter-weight
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 20:08 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Security is going to be the biggest deal. Probably the oldest that I'd be willing to run is going to be Debian Woody.
But there are other reasons.. For example disk I/O should be faster on modern kernels versus older ones. I've sworn that I've read that benchmarks with newer kernels on older hardware show a substancial increase in performance. Lots of other things are going to be faster on modern software then older stuff... I think feature for feature if you use the same style of software that was aviable on older machines then it should actually be faster now then it was before.
Like the first time i realy used Linux was with Redhat 7.0 on a (overclocked) 200mhz machine with 96 megs of RAM. With Gnome 1.x series. Nowadays I can get better stability and functionality with Window Maker, Epiphany, Thunderbird, Abiword and other applications and it probably would be just as fast or faster then what I originally used.
Then you also now have things like Rox file system, Dillo, graphical versions of Links, and all sorts of stuff like that can provide good functionality to resource strapped computers.
Also there is stability and such.. Modern systems come with journalling file systems, for example. Ext3 does not cary with it much more overhead when compmared to Ext2, but has vastly improved data protection capabilities.. which improve as time goes on. Older systems also provide a level of maturity over more modern hardware.. hardware drivers have had lots of time to mature and get the bugs shaken out. Tools like Alsaconf allow it to make it easier to use modern driver designs to get good sound out of older sound cards. Dmix allows you to multiply multiple sound sources and such.
As long as you avoid certain resource-sapping features (such as using 800x600 resolutions in 16bit and avoiding anti-aliased text instead of getting everything fancy) you can probably get better performance and stability with more modern software then using old stuff.
that is unless your dealing with very old hardware... Talking about 20megs of RAM or less with 60-120mhz machines and such. Then your going down below the thresehold that even 'minimalist' software authors are willing to support. When using Xen I can't even get a 2.6 series kernel to boot on virtual machines with only 16megs of RAM alocated to them.
I remember trying to get a old 386 thinkpad working using Linux. It had 8 megs (could of been less) of RAM total. I couldn't even get floppy-based Linux systems to boot up on them because it didn't have enough RAM to support a ramdrive for them to function with more then one floppy disk. After struggling with it for quite a bit I could get some kernel installed, but my only source of software that I could use was from some ancient version of Slackware.
For situations like that I would expect that FreeDOS would be a much much better choice then Linux. Maybe NetBSD. http://www.freedos.org/
After giving up on Linux (got it working, but didn't find anything interesting I could do with it) I've found that it made a absolutely fantastic serial terminal for my Linux box. I was absolutely suprised on how well it worked out for that task. This was before I discovered FreeDOS and I used MSDOS 6.00 with Kermit and a Null Modem Serial cable (called Laplink cables.. carefull serial cables are wired differently and using the wrong type can damage your hardware) to log into a getty. This was great use for it and provided a extra keyboard and terminal for doing things like controlling the cdrom music, monitoring logs, and launching games and such on my desktop system.
If you have a old laptop with a fried battery or whatnot I wholeheartedly recommend it as a X or Serial terminal to a more powerfull machine. It's like a mobile keyboard and monitor that you can take anywere and attatch to your servers and such.
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 26, 2006 6:50 UTC (Sun) by barryn (subscriber, #5996) [Link] Security is going to be the biggest deal. Probably the oldest that I'd be willing to run is going to be Debian Woody. There's also Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1. It's a little older than woody (it's roughly equivalent to Red Hat 7.2), but it will be supported by Red Hat (including security fixes) until May 31, 2009. (And if you don't want to pay Red Hat, run CentOS 2.1 and get basically the same software -- without Red Hat support -- for free.)
Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) Posted Feb 25, 2006 17:52 UTC (Sat) by a9db0 (subscriber, #2181) [Link] There is one other benefit to older hardware - Linux Terminals. I have an old P90 with 384mb that I use as a terminal. Boots linux, runs fwm95 just fine, handles basic browsing with local processing, and runs X apps like OpenOffice on my server. It even runs Vmware/Windows 2000 sessions nicely, which is great for my 4 year old. She can play games and muck about without worry, as I can simply reset her session to the last stable snapshot I made. It's quiet, and uses less power than any of my Athlon based systems.
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