a "Distros for Older Computers" thread...

[IsaacKuo]

What are the distros good for older computers? I've seen a lot of small distributions which minimize disk size, but the two things older computers are really hurting for is CPU speed and RAM.

So let's assume we want to turn an old <Pentium II system into a graphical workstation. NOT a router--hardware routers are cheap and generally better anyway. NOT a text based system--might as well just be a dumb terminal to get better performance.

What distro's are suitable for turning an older computer into a graphical workstation? What hardware will they run well on?

Which ones are suitable for network boot?
Which ones are suitable as an X terminal?
Which ones are suitable as a network boot X terminal?


Personally, I'm most interested in relatively high end "older" computers--I've got three P100 systems w/32M RAM each begging to be turned into network boot silent computers. (Not just quiet--SILENT--as in no moving parts, other than the floppy with PXE boot).

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Hayl]

There are already _many_ threads on this subject. Usually mdwatts provides a URL to some site that lists distros "for old computers" whenever someone asks this question.

try searching the forum before asking, most questions of this type have already been asked and answered many times before.

[JohnT]

Slackware is an excellent one.....you can still download 8.1 at various mirrors......"fir" instance...http://www.slackware.at/data/

[IsaacKuo]

Having searched and read through the most recent ones, none of them seem to actually get at any advantages/disadvantages of them. Also, IMO none of them actually address the idea of what's best for turning an older computer into a USEFUL workstation. Most seem obsessed with how small a distro is on the hard drive.

Assuming the user has a LAN with at least one more powerful computer, it seems obvious to me that there's no need to emphasize how small a hard drive it can be crammed into. Network booting essentially eliminates the need for extreme distro size reduction. What remains are the problems of slow CPU speed and little RAM.

Given the CPU power and RAM limitations, it may make sense for the system to be an X terminal. Thus, IMHO, one important option for turning an older computer into a useful workstation would be to make it a network booting X terminal.

And YES, I did search the forums. AFAICT, there's not a single thread which answers the question of what distro is suitable for running a network booting X terminal on and older computer.

[Hayl]

Originally posted by IsaacKuo
And YES, I did search the forums. AFAICT, there's not a single thread which answers the question of what distro is suitable for running a network booting X terminal on and older computer.

Probably because any / all of them can.

[Dark Ninja]

Well, my personal recommendation would be Gentoo -- for the simple reason that you get to choose EVERYTHING that is on your system (assuming you go with Level 1 install). Even Level 3 install gives you a huge number of choices as what to run and not run.

Although I have a 1.3Ghz, 256RAM on my system, I am running a numerous amount of things without even using up all my RAM (as reported by GKrellm). If you want to use X, but don't want to take up the entire system resources, I'd recommend a windowing system such as Fluxbox.

The biggest hinderance to an older system is the kernel -- you want to keep that kernel as small as possible. The 2.6 kernel seems to be pretty large in comparison to the 2.4, so you may want to stick with the vanilla-source of the kernel during the Gentoo install. If you're feeling daring, you can always try the 2.6 one at a later time.

Hope things work out for you.

[Hayl]

Originally posted by Dark Ninja
If you want to use X, but don't want to take up the entire system resources, I'd recommend a windowing system such as Fluxbox.

or this: http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/tinyX01.html

[IsaacKuo]

Originally posted by Dark Ninja
Although I have a 1.3Ghz, 256RAM on my system,

By "older", I meant <Pentium II...something in the range of a 386 to a Pentium Pro, and between 640K and 64Megs of RAM.

I'm running Knoppix right now, which recommends at least ~80Megs of RAM for a graphical environment. The graphical applications included in this distro are NOT suitable for "older" computers by any stretch of the imagination.

Sure, I suppose you can manually go in and heavily modify any distribution to strip it down and search around for suitable software to install to make it run on an old P100 with 32Megs of RAM. However, there are obviously some smaller distros which are much better starting points than others.

Alternatively, you could take the view that all distros are essentially equal anyway, so this entire forum is utterly pointless.

[Hayl]

Originally posted by IsaacKuo
Sure, I suppose you can manually go in and heavily modify any distribution to strip it down and search around for suitable software to install to make it run on an old P100 with 32Megs of RAM. However, there are obviously some smaller distros which are much better starting points than others.

start off with a minimal distro that doesn't even install X or anything - like Gentoo or Debian. Debian woudl be better unless you want to wait for days for things to compile on Gentoo any time somethign gets upgraded to a new version. i ran a (Debian) server on a Pentium Pro for a very long time , doign email, ftp, file and print, etc..

PS: all distros are essentially the same except for the package management system they use, potentially any custom kernel patches, and the software that does or does not come preinstalled. so yes, this ".iso confused" forum is useless.

[JohnT]

Sure, I suppose you can manually go in and heavily modify any distribution to strip it down and search around for suitable software to install to make it run on an old P100 with 32Megs of RAM. However, there are obviously some smaller distros which are much better starting points than others. With Slack there is no heavy modification or stripping down...you install exactly what you want . Slack installs in "sets".....this will explain.
http://www.slackware.com/install/softwaresets.php

[dboyer]

Originally posted by IsaacKuo
Alternatively, you could take the view that all distros are essentially equal anyway, so this entire forum is utterly pointless.

Wow, a break through... HEY HC! we have a winner!



just kidding.. anyhoo, Knoppix uses KDE.. mayhaps thats the problem? any distro that loads KDE by default is going to try and gobble up tons of memory, i think...

you might also try loading applications over the network using SSH or something... run SSH -X my.bigpowerful.desktop from your crappy old box and then run an app ($ gaim) and see if that works... you can also try taking the ram out of one box, and sticking it into the other (one with 64 megs)...

The problem is you're trying to solve this with a solution that isn't really "distro-level"... distros are different on the way their configured/package management software (gentoo comes as %100 source), etc... you need light apps... you can get the same light app on every distro...

no openoffice for you :( no matter if you run RH or Slack or gentoo or debian or whatever...

[IsaacKuo]

Okay, I was thinking of distros like the following:

Originally posted by o0zi
Perhaps we need a "Distros for Older Computers" thread...

There's DeLi, Feather, Damn Small, Flonix, Puppy, Vector, muLinux, Slax, Morphix LightGUI - each has its advantages and disadvantages.

I didn't want to "hijack" the Deli thread with discussion of other lightweight distros, so I started a new thread.

Deli was designed specifically around collecting software suitable for older computers into a coherent distro. I'm not sure about all of those others, but I've seen most of them on Knoppix's list of variants and they seem mostly concerned with being able to fit on a business card or other small media, rather than usability on an older computer.

I get the message that everyone's saying here--why let someone else do the footwork that they've already done, when you can manually do all the work over again yourself?

Before reading about Deli, I had already prepared myself to customizing my own heavy remaster of Knoppix--but then I thought, Deli's pretty close except it seems to not have Knoppix's excellent hardware auto-detection and Knoppix's ability to run a network server off of live-CD. My thoughts have thus turned toward emulating Deli's software package as closely as I can with a heavy Knoppix remaster. Hopefully, I can get the advantages of Deli's pre-researched lite apps while retaining the features of Knoppix I desired.

For my particular purposes, I think it makes more sense to start with Knoppix and turn it into something more like Deli, than the other way around. But my particular purposes are pretty narrow. I'm hoping to put together my own live CD Knoppix variant which is actually supposed to be run on the server rather than the "older computer" clients. (The latter would be network booting X terminals, so the server is both network boot server and X terminal server.)

But maybe my idea is stupid. After all, it would just be another distro, and they're all the same. Why make a distro when everyone else can just figure it out themselves anyway?

[psi42]

Originally posted by IsaacKuo

Before reading about Deli, I had already prepared myself to customizing my own heavy remaster of Knoppix--but then I thought, Deli's pretty close except it seems to not have Knoppix's excellent hardware auto-detection and Knoppix's ability to run a network server off of live-CD. My thoughts have thus turned toward emulating Deli's software package as closely as I can with a heavy Knoppix remaster. Hopefully, I can get the advantages of Deli's pre-researched lite apps while retaining the features of Knoppix I desired.

For my particular purposes, I think it makes more sense to start with Knoppix and turn it into something more like Deli, than the other way around. But my particular purposes are pretty narrow. I'm hoping to put together my own live CD Knoppix variant which is actually supposed to be run on the server rather than the "older computer" clients. (The latter would be network booting X terminals, so the server is both network boot server and X terminal server.)

Sounds intriguing.

DeLi uses XFree86 3.3.6, which uses a different config file format than 4.x.x, so Knoppix's autodetect scripts might not work out of the box, so that will be a little speedbump.


I'm hoping to put together my own live CD Knoppix variant which is actually supposed to be run on the server rather than the "older computer" clients.


Just curious, why a Live CD? If it is going to be run on a server, why not do a HD install? That would make everything faster, no?

Keep us posted. :)

~psi42

[IsaacKuo]

Originally posted by psi42
Just curious, why a Live CD? If it is going to be run on a server, why not do a HD install? That would make everything faster, no?


Mainly because the Knoppix documentation for running a network boot server is oriented toward doing it from the live CD. I don't know what I'm doing--network booting and X terminals are both completely new to me.

Also, I like the idea of running the server off of a Knoppix live CD because that way one can run the server off of any computer just by putting the CD in. Thus, someone wanting to try this setup out only needs to burn the .iso to CD and maybe make a PXE boot floppy.

[lagdawg]

I have an older P 75 system with only 16 mb or ram. I put Damn Small Linux on it and it runs fairly well. It can be slow at times, but what do you expect for an older system trying to run X. I also know of people who have put it on 486's. It is a Knoppix based live cd but the default WM is FluxBox instead of KDE so it runs better, and it is stable. It also has a script included for doing a HD install which I have done and it is pretty easy to do. I had it running for like two weeks without a hard drive and then had it up for well over 2 months before I moved and now I haven't used for a while. Hopefully I will get it back out and have time to tweak it make run better.

[gentgeen]

I have found the the best use of a P100-p200 with 32mb-64mb of RAM is as a X terminal. One option is the K12LTSP (http://www.k12ltsp.org) distro, which takes the LTSP packages it with Fedora, and rolls it all into one distro. It is designed to be easy to be used by teachers without a lot of time on their hands - i.e. easy to set-up and easy to use. I have set up a K12LTSP system in my own classroom using my Dell desktop as the server, and 8 donated P100 class machines as terminals. The terminals do not need a HD, or CDROM, everything is run on the server.

Personally, I took that same idea and use it at home. I have two Thinkpad 380 series machines. Both have 32mb RAM and 133 and 166 Mhz processors. I installed a slime down Debian on them (My prefered distro). They can run as a stand along box, or as a terminal. Over my wireless network, I just issue X :1 -query 192.168.0.3 and I am using my desktop system from anywhere in the house. I have even set the laptop up so if my wife logs on, it does not use a WM, but uses VNC in full screen mode to display the Win98 box downstairs, so see can use here desktop from anywhere in the house. Here .xsession file looks like this:xvncviewer -passwd $HOME/.vnc/passwd -fullscreen 192.168.0.1:1Althougth the is some lag with the VNC, the X terminal works great.

[IsaacKuo]

Thanks, gentgeen! K12LTSP looks incredible--exactly the sort of distro I've been looking for. I think I'm still going to try the Knoppix variant idea and see how far I can get with that, but in the meantime K12LTSP will get my P100's up and running.

I love the detailed and user-friendly how-to/explanatory pages at K12LTSP's web site, too!

[gentgeen]

Glad it helped -- If you do try it out, I would also sign up for the mailing list. It is very busy, but they are very helpful. And I have learned a lot about linux just by reading other peoples problems