(Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines

dragonchild has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by hsinclai (Deacon) on May 26, 2004 at 16:00 UTC
suse. install in manual mode, minimum distro; use blackbox or windowmaker, mozilla. Put in 64M more RAM for 20 bucks. KDE or Gnome would be slow though. My web server is a PII 233 using plone, apache, mod_perl, and mod_gzip, iptables, sshd, I haven't had any resources issues or complaints.	[reply]
Re: Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by dws (Chancellor) on May 26, 2004 at 16:25 UTC
I'll second the Suse recommendation. I had an older Suse running headless (no X) on an even smaller box (P133, 64Mb) without significant problems.	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by diotalevi (Canon) on May 26, 2004 at 16:23 UTC
Huh. You had me going with "very old machines." I was all set to tell you that it took Slackware 3.4 to install on my 4MB 386 laptop. But 64MB, 233MHz? Heck, you can run whatever the heck you want on that thing. The only thing to watch out for is processes that consume lots of memory.	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by mawe (Hermit) on May 26, 2004 at 16:04 UTC
Hi! OK, I'm not an expert, but the computer I currently use also has a 233MHz processor :-/. It't too slow to run KDE or Gnome, so I use WindowMaker which works well (you can run KDE, but it's soooo slow). I think (remember: not an expert!) it doesn't matter which distro you use, but I would suggest Debian.	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by hardburn (Abbot) on May 26, 2004 at 16:14 UTC
On that system, you can probably get X running quite fine, as long as you use a minimalist window manager. You won't be able to run the latest-and-greatest KDE/GNOME apps, but you should be able to start a browser. Debian and Slackware are good choices here. ---- send money to your kernel via the boot loader.. This and more wisdom available from Markov Hardburn.	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by pizza_milkshake (Monk) on May 26, 2004 at 15:58 UTC
i'm doing something similiar, that is, planning on installing linux or *bsd on a ~200MHz machine. i've tried a bunch of distros (not on the slow box, just in general) and i'm hooked on gentoo. package management via emerge has been very nice. however, you don't want to spend a month compiling all the packages. however, one can start at stage3, not having to compile core packages that take about a day even on a fast box. gentoo's emerge does have binary packages available for some things, but i dunno about all. i'm considering trying debian again, i tried it a few years ago and after considerable install difficulties i was so dissappointed at the lagtime of the stable install that i nuked it. however a friend of mine ran debian for a while and said one can get almost the latest and greatest packages by choosing the "non-stable" option for everything. the other OSes i'd consider would be FreeBSD or possibly OpenBSD. i'm setting the machine up as a firewall, i assume you want a desktop, so you likely have different priorities. perl -e"\$_=qq/nwdd\x7F^n\x7Flm{{llql0}qs\x14/;s/./chr(ord$&^30)/ge;print"	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by McMahon (Chaplain) on May 26, 2004 at 16:05 UTC
Consider one of the BSDs. NetBSD runs on anything. Update: I'm running FreeBSD on a PII at work, not sure the speed. No problems with KDE. "make install /usr/ports/foo/bar" is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Just don't expect to do ARP poisoning undetected. =)	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by bhappy (Scribe) on May 27, 2004 at 06:56 UTC
i would try booting from knoppix live cd with something like 'knoppix desktop=fluxbox' on a boot line (there is knoppix-cheatcodes.txt on that cd). there is also knx-hdinstal on the cd, using it you can install knoppix on you hard drive. the good thing about it - you can try it without going through the installation process	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by halley (Prior) on May 26, 2004 at 16:08 UTC
Why can't you install Red Hat Linux? I mean, you probably won't be able to fit a modern Fedora or RHEL build and be satisfied, but RHL7.2 should be quite useful for a limited-use machine with reasonable userland capability. -- `[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]`	[reply]
Re: Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by dragonchild (Archbishop) on May 26, 2004 at 17:19 UTC
The installer from my copy of 7.1 won't start without 128M of RAM and a 400MHz machine. Go figure. :-/ ------ We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age. Then there are Damian modules.... sigh* ... that's not about being less-lazy -- that's about being on some really good drugs -- you know, there is no spoon.* - flyingmoose I shouldn't have to say this, but any code, unless otherwise stated, is untested	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by b10m (Vicar) on May 26, 2004 at 17:31 UTC
And people over at RH sit at their desks pondering the question "Why do they hate us?". Those specs are absolutely insane. Linux doesn't require all that power... -- b10m All code is usually tested, but rarely trusted.	[reply]
Re: Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by iburrell (Chaplain) on May 26, 2004 at 18:30 UTC
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by b10m (Vicar) on May 26, 2004 at 18:54 UTC
Re: Re: Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by BigRare (Pilgrim) on May 26, 2004 at 23:19 UTC
You might want to try the text installer. According to the RedHat website, version 7.1 can run on a 386. Here's the link.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by mawe (Hermit) on May 27, 2004 at 05:54 UTC
The installer from my copy of 7.1 won't start without 128M of RAM and a 400MHz machine. Go figure. :-/ I installed RedHat 8.0 on my computer (233MHz, 64M RAM) without any problems.	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by deibyz (Hermit) on May 26, 2004 at 16:33 UTC
I'll recommend you some more configurable distro instead of desktop oriented ones as RedHat or Mandrake. It can be a little harder to get it running, but you will have a better control of what you have in your system. As everything, it's matter of personal preference, and I'd choose Debian, but maybe Gentoo would be good too, but the installation may hurt if you haven't a bigger computer for compiling the sources. LFS is another option if you have lot of free time.	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by castaway (Parson) on May 27, 2004 at 06:50 UTC
Just have to put in tuppence here. I've not come across a distro that requires a minimal CPU/RAM setup, but maybe Ive just been lucky. I ran SuSE installs on p200, p233 (until the hardware died, sniff!), and currently on a p350 with no problems. (currently at SuSE 8.2/9.0). The graphical installer works fine. Also my router is running SuSE 7.3 on 12MB (!!) of ram (P130 or so cpuinfo claims), and doing fine. Ok, so thats not using X at all, but still :) boggle C.	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by revdiablo (Prior) on May 26, 2004 at 17:14 UTC
Any suggestions? This is prime territory for flame wars, but to throw in my $0.02USD, I'd go with Debian. I just installed it on a P200 with 64MB ram. I only installed a bare-bones X11 setup, rather than a full blown KDE or Gnome, so it runs fine. Of course, the actual performance will depend on what software you want to run...	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by Ven'Tatsu (Deacon) on May 26, 2004 at 18:32 UTC
I've run Debian (2.0 through 3.0) on a computer with 133MHz and 16MB of RAM. It certanly was never quick, but it has been quite usable for my intentions. It ran X a bit slowly, but it was still usable.	[reply]
Re: (Very OT): Good Linux distro for very old machines by neilwatson (Priest) on May 26, 2004 at 20:07 UTC
I've installed both Gentoo and Debian on older machines. Both work well. If you have the time, Gentoo's method of building your apps from source will give you a good performance boost in the end. It's also worth noting that Gentoo can, like Debian, install packages from binary builds Neil Watson watson-wilson.ca	[reply]