Linux for low-end HW, pseudo-scientific study(1)

I’ll keep an eye out for your conclusions, as I have a number of older laptops which I play with a bit but would love a decent Firefox browser computer in the kitchen (meaning, a distro with decent drivers!)

D00d. ;-> A whole lot of us used to run major Linux servers on 486 machines with 32MB RAM — and the old incarnation of my Web server, linuxmafia.com, used to be an AMI Enterprise III EISA/VLB 486DX2/66 motherboard with 64 MB, which not only ran SMTP e-mail and Apache 1.3.x, but also ran the X Window System in foreground — and sailed right through being slashdotted a couple of times.

Even with bloated 2009 kernels, you can still do either Debian or Slackware on 64 MB machines. The trick is to start with an absolutely minimal install, and avold even installing at all any “desktop environment” — no LXDE, no XFCE4, no KDE-anything, no GNOME. Pare down autostart services to what you actually need, disable unneeded virtual terminals in /etc/inittab (you need at most two, not six), and install just plain X Window System with your choice of old-school window manager. Blackbox, Icewm, Window Maker, fvwm, any of those.

It works fine. We did it all the time.

You’ll not be running most modern applications, though, and sure as heck won’t be running Firefox, let alone OpenOffice.org. Maybe not even recent releases of Abiword and Gnumeric, not sure about that. They’ve all grown a bit since the old days, because everyone assumes those old RAM-starved boxes are dead or dying.

RIck Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Jorge: I respect Puppy Linux for being a nice trick of making a usable demonstration system in 100MB that functions without the need to customise, but the list of drawbacks is way too high for daily use, starting with zero security, i.e., everything runs as the root user unless you retrofit a recent third-party package called Puppy-Multiuser.

For purposes of installing a usable Linux system onto a Pentium MMX / 128MB RAM / 2GB disk machine, you don’t need a distro that default-installs a tiny system that can’t ever do much; what you actually need is a real Linux distribution that you can install in a sparse fashion and limit the RAM usage of. The latter requires a little more work, and a little more understanding what you’re doing, but the results are so very much better.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Jorge, I suspect that the customisation work required is too much work if you don’t understand how to do non-default installations, plus understand system config files and (in particular) the startup process, but really fast and trivial if you do. My larger point is that learning those things should be your very next step, after having fun kicking the tires with various distros’ default installations. You’ll have immensely greater satisfaction from Linux, far greater control, fewer mysteries, fewer problems, once you understand how processes start, which ones you want running, and how to prevent others from wasting scarce resources, especially on low-hardware-spec machines where it really matters.

It’s not actually very difficult. Back in the day, I learned it because (not having RAM to waste) I needed to know. If you’re using low-spec machines, inherently you’re in the same you-need-to-know-this boat. Just spend an hour or two learning how the System V Init process works (on distros that haven’t moved on to newer, event-driven inits), how to best install/remove packages on your distro, and how to do a sparse, non-default installation. You’ll never regret the time it takes.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Thanks for some of the suggestions so far!
Several things I’m already seeing: 1) the Debian-based distros (Lenny, Squeeze, DSL, Knoppix) are just SHINING STARS(!) among the other distros used on these low-end PCs 2) Zenwalk and Slackware-based distros with their LILO-Nature;-) just have not been installing that easily on low-end PIII’s. Problems with having to choose which original Slack disk-sets pkgs are REALLY necessary, problems with the ENORMOUS time it takes to get all those TGZ packages installed, and problems with the copying the TGZ pkgs to hard drives during the install itself (all the Slack-based distros used here seem to be CONSISTENTLY finicky about using lower-end CDROM drives (?)) 3) Puppy boots up acceptably on the PIII’s, but would agree w Rick that this does NOT appear to be the best INSTALLABLE distro on these particular PCs 4) AntiX M8.x “might” be okay for the 200MHz MMX’s, and based upon separate feedback, MEPIS 8.0.x and Arch 2009.x “might” be okay for the PIII’s.

For clarification – the author, goosbears, is not Jack – but another berkeleylug member Aaron. Now, I fully expect to hear a lecture on usernames 🙂

Rick et al, Helpful info and advice for certain! 🙂 There is also another type of Linux “distribution” (quotes deliberate here) which you probably already know about, and which seems to get down to real low-level Linux basics. This pseudo-distribution is called Linux From Scratch, its website is http://www.linuxfromscratch.org , and it requires you to spend a significant amt of time to REALLY learn the ins and outs of Linux. Here is its description: “Linux From Scratch (LFS) is a project that provides you with step-by-step instructions for building your own custom Linux system, entirely from source code.” I think that if I had more time, it would be well-worth it to go through LFS on one of the Pentium I MMX 200MHz PCs.
As it is, I won’t be able to get around to using LFS this particular time around, but others reading this are very much welcome to try out LFS or its different subprojects on your own low-end PCs, and then let us know how they work out for ya.