Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com) [LWN.net]

Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 25, 2006 1:11 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
Parent article: Linux distros for older hardware (Linux.com)

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.

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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 (subscriber, #2599) [Link]

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