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The RULE Project

May 26, 2004

This article was contributed by Jason Bechtel

A modest computer training center appears in the African Republic of Togo in December of 1998. In January, 2001 a Cyber Cafe goes up in Cameroon. In the summer of 2002 a "Computer-College" is established in Congo. Around Africa and across the developing world, technology is seeping in. People there may have very little, but they do have hope and they need jobs. They need to start nurturing a local tech community, building local skills and creating human capital.

Most of the world is not fortunate enough to have access to the latest hardware and they have neither the money nor the local computer store for acquiring parts. If free software is to fulfill the promise of software access for all, then something needs to be done to accommodate the needs of the great majority of the world running on donated 486– and Pentium–era computers.

Unfortunately, the mainstream distributions do not target older hardware. Even selecting individual packages presents problems because of cascading dependencies (try removing gpm). Some suggest using older releases, but older software often lacks important features, contains many security holes, and no longer has an active support community.

Enter the RULE Project (Run Up2date Linux Everywhere). RULE is not a new distribution. It makes an existing distribution install and run on older hardware. Specifically, it takes standard Red Hat Linux, adds a custom installer, provides resource–friendly RPM package lists, and packages alternative light–weight GPL applications. The advantage of this approach is that the original distribution provides all the patches and documentation, reducing the maintenance load for RULE.

The result is amazing. Machines that would otherwise have been unusable are suddenly doing web browsing, word processing, instant messaging, and even multimedia tasks.

Of course, using alternative programs is a huge part of what makes this possible. Instead of Mozilla or Opera, you use w3m or links or dillo. Instead of OpenOffice.org, you use AbiWord and Gnumeric. Instead of KDE, you use IceWM or XFCE. But the other secret is KDrive, Keith Packard's light–weight X server. This allows X to consume much less memory. It doesn't do everything that the full–blown X does, but it provides the core functionality at a greatly reduced resource penalty.

At the helm of this effort is Marco Fioretti, a telecommunications systems designer in Rome, Italy. It all started when he spoke up on the Red Hat users mailing list. Standing up to much resistance, he argued for better packaging to reduce dependencies, for more optimization and for less bloat. Despite initial cynicism, he pushed on. When he opened the project on Savannah, people began to join. One of those people was Michael Fratoni, an electronics technician in New England. Michael had already become familiar with the difficulties of slimming down Linux by putting together low–resource firewalls for family and friends. He never expected to become the project's lead developer, but he is responsible for most of what has been implemented so far.

From their "home" page, the goals of the project are to

Modify the current Red Hat Linux installer so that it runs in less than 32 MB of RAM, or create a new one if needed
Select, test, and (if needed) package the system and desktop applications which give the greatest real functionality with the smallest consumption of CPU and RAM resources
Create another installation option for the Red Hat Linux distribution, containing all and only the packages above, optimized to run either a server, or a basic desktop on obsolete hardware with very little RAM and HD space
Promote and support (especially in developing countries) the use of this install option with schools, public and private organizations

Thanks to Michael, they have already completed their first goal. They have created Miniconda, a low–resource version of Red Hat's installer, Anaconda, that lowers the memory requirement from 20MB to about 12MB and provides reduced package lists.

They have also created Slinky, a completely new installation routine written in Bash, which can do a complete install on a system with only 8MB of RAM. Both installers work with the latest Red Hat Linux distribution media, but Slinky is under active development and Miniconda appears to be on the way out.

Now that Red Hat Linux has become Fedora Linux and is taking on a much more community–driven aspect, RULE is poised to make great strides toward its other goals. Last fall, Marco announced his group's intentions on the Fedora developers list. Besides an endorsement from Alan Cox, he received encouragement from a kernel RPM maintainer. While Fedora will likely not restructure its packaging, it sounds like RULE will soon be able to have a low–resources i386 kernel configuration maintained within Fedora.

So, if you have a system that balks at the demands of the latest distributions, but you want to have access to a large, flourishing user community, look into RULE. Install it on that old 486 in the closet. Submit your results to their test machine list. Join the mailing list. Pitch in and help with the website or the database or the development.

More importantly, if you are looking to deploy a herd of old boxen in an underfunded area, RULE could be the way to make those donated systems useful again. I cannot overstate the importance of RULE in the developing world and in underprivileged neighborhoods. It is already being used to great success by VUM (the Association for the Support of Humans) in several African nations. It can be made to serve many other purposes such as this.

There are, of course, other noteworthy attempts to bring GNU/Linux to low–resource systems. The KNOPPIX revolution has spawned several LiveCD contenders, such as Feather, Puppy, and DamnSmall Linux. These can be run from CD and thus do not require a hard drive. They come with light–weight desktops like Fluxbox and apps like dillo. One weakness of this approach is that the CDROM drives one generally finds in today's donated PCs are often excruciatingly slow (4x). In this case, the ability to install to a hard drive is quite valuable.

Vector Linux is a distribution based on Slackware that claims to perform admirably on a 386. It is a very polished distribution and may be a good choice for donated PCs, but it doesn't seem to be as "hard core" as RULE. For instance, it uses the full-blown XFree86 X-server instead of kdrive. It might be appropriate for a 586 with 64MB of RAM, but probably wouldn't give much hope to someone using a 486 with 16MB of RAM.

There has been talk recently on the RULE mailing list of using RULE with LTSP. The Linux Terminal Server Project also gives new life to old hardware. It takes the thin client approach, using a decently powerful server to serve up logins, applications, and storage to terminals over a network. While RULE and LTSP take different approaches, they can work together nicely. RULE can be used as the basis for the LTSP server, allowing it to do more with less. So, while an LTSP server tasked with serving up KDE, OpenOffice.org and Mozilla to 12 terminals would have to be a dual-processor P-III with at least 512 MB of RAM, a RULE-ified LTSP server providing IceWM, AbiWord, and dillo to 12 terminals could be a PII-350 with 128 MB of RAM.

In short, while there are other distributions and projects that recognize the need to serve older hardware, only RULE exists in its particular niche. It may be a while before a "Low–Resources" option appears in the installers of the main distributions. Until then, there's RULE.

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