This article strikes me largely as, someone else should be doing this for me so I can benefit from their hard work. It's as if they miss the point of Linux, free software, etc...
This problem exists because people, like this author, who are in to vintage systems aren't taking up the mantle to maintain a distribution to support their old systems. It's like they want the benefit with zero effort. Become a leader, start the work and organize a community to take your favorite distribution and make it work on your legacy system.
OP first needs to decide what the actual problem is they want to solve.
> Either they are filled with bugs, refuse to install on my computer's hard drive, require too much RAM, run too slowly, lack important drivers or codecs, are no longer actively supported, do not support 32-bit CPU's, are too difficult for novices to use, or have other highly-annoying problems like, for example, poor use of swap space.
Most of these problems could be tackled without having to invent a whole new distribution – bugs can be fixed, swap usage can be tuned, drivers can be packaged and added, etc. Any of these, apparently, would make one or several currently borderline useful distribution into a fully usable one.
Or maybe not, going by OP's other blog posts (e.g. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/surf-internet.html) they're proud of not understanding how Linux distributions work. ("the same number of bugs as the average Linux distribution"?!, Complaining that lightweight distributions don't have as many preinstalled programs as big ones, dpkg -i'ing random packages designed for other distributions, …)
The article about surfing the internet on an old machine made me look up the SlimJet browser mentioned. The SlimJet website (https://www.slimjet.com/) is either extremely funny, or extremely suspicious. It has an late 90' early 2000' vibe going on.
>I also found that I was able to play 480p Youtube videos in full-screen mode and listen to music on Pandora.
Holy shit, he/she is very uninformed. Pandora plays perfectly with some CLI player (I can't remember it's name), and for youtube damn mpv with youtube-dl (my config for my trash machine) will play any 720p video fast as hell.
Yup, I've got mpv playing back 720p youtube on a 1.8Ghz Pentium M machine with no trouble at all.
The real issue I'm having is that with all the old 2D graphics acceleration API's being deprecated in X11, you are stuck with Glamor to accelerate desktop compositing, and that only works if you have a later fixed function GPU, or a modern programmable GPU. If you're stuck with an old ATI FireGL like I am, X11 will vomit an error about the GPU not having enough instruction slots to do the job.
Its kind of baffling, the hardware is capable enough to run Half Life 2, but it can't composite a few windows? I'm almost tempted to go compile X11 myself and remove that particular check.
I am also against a throwaway society but there comes a point where you need to accept old computers/vehicles/toys/instruments/tools are beyond your ability to maintain/use them. If you want to fork over some money semi-regularly or learn how to do it yourself, it becomes an ornament.
Somehow expecting 20 year old computing hardware to be supported now, free of charge, in Linux is a valid criticism. 20 years ago, setting that computer up was a nightmare for non tech-savvy folk but current distributions need to support your horse and cart.
edit
"but many over pay for the best of everything simply because they are unwilling to understand what they really need or learn how to make do with less" - old man yelling at clouds
It's also trivially easy to pick up five year old computer parts for a few of whichever monetary unit you use. Ten year old stuff will run perfectly and is often free. Twenty year old? That's entering hobbyist territory. The effort required to support those with modern OS'es is completely out of proportion, and makes little sense, and in terms of power consumption such an old computer is not a very sustainable choice either for the performance you'll get.
5 year old enterprise hardware is only now leaving its warranty cycle.
10 year old laptops can take either 8 or 16 GB RAM and have at least 2 cores + hyperthreading. It'll not just run perfectly, but it'll run even the most bloated Linux distributions or Win 10 just fine.
Right, 10 years ago is e.g. Sandy Bridge Core 2 Duo systems. Thinkpad X220, things like that. Potentially even has USB3 and an SSD already, or can be upgraded.
20 years ago is AMD Duron and Pentium 4, pretty much just getting past single-core 1 Ghz (various 1.x GHz variants were announced during 2001). very different world.
X220 is technically 9 years old, that gives you USB3, two SSDs, and a whopping 16GB RAM.
The exactly ten years old X201 is limited to 8GB RAM, but you can retrofit USB3 with an ExpressCard adapter and it can take one SSD. Two with the optional docking station.
It's a bit complicated. Linux the kernel no longer supports certain machines for valid reasons. However, many if not most userland tools (with the exception of these that actually use certain CPU extensions) would gladly run on an 386 if compiled for it even if the current kernel version doesn't support it.
The problem is, you need the whole system to support, say, 386. So one solution would be to use the last version of your distro supporting it, and then compile each new piece of software. Realistically, you would use another (modern) machine for cross-compilation of any significant piece of software, and you will definitely encounter some interesting quirks. Nevertheless, it's doable, as long as you are willing to accept you're running an unpatched kernel.
Almost infeasible because of much longer compile times and higher memory requirements for doing so.
If you have access to systems capable of doing that, usually the need for using such old systems doesn't exist. Except if you'd like to have some X-terminals, or hand them down (refurbished) to relatives, some community projects, or similar.
I'd go for something like Antix because that way you have access to the almost infinite binary package repositories.
I had a Dell C400 about 12yrs ago running on P3m. But, it was light and compact but dated back then and running Windows XP. So, I learned how to install back then Gentoo and it ran beautifully. I would of held onto it but the battery wouldn't last and couldn't find a good replacement.
I kinda having the same issue with my Samsung Chromebook XE303C12 today lol. But it's limited by soldered on hardware and I think the display driver is closed source.
This is a problem inherent to Linux, that is, you need maintainers, with APIs changing regularly.
Windows is a lot more stable in that regard, and mainframes are not even on the same league.
It is a choice made by the Linux community, it goes very well with its open source nature and it has advantage in terms of performance and ease of implementing new features, but the drawback is that you can't keep compatibility without active maintenance.
Linux-the-kernel has not only a stable API, but also a stable ABI, and you can run 20 years old software compiled against that ABI just fine.
The problem is that the userland doesn't give a fuck and breaks itself every other day just for the lulz, starting with the glibc, which doesn't even allow fully static compilation.
So you'll have to use 20 years old versions of everything (but the kernel), which makes running one piece of old software nonviable… but that's hardly the kernel's fault.
I would rather say, the kernel-userland interface is stable. I think it is one of the strongest rule regarding the Linux kernel: don't break userland.
In the kernel itself, however, drivers have to be constantly maintained, which is a PITA if your driver is not in the mainline, but very nice if it is, especially if there is someone to do the job of maintaining it for you.
Again, choices are made, you can't have everything. The ones that led to Linux are good, we know that with the power of hindsight, seeing how successful it has became, not because everything about it is positive (it can't).
> But, given that Linux is a community-supported operating system that does not need to make a profit,
Linux doesn't need money to make a living, software maintainers do.
> I see no valid reason for it not supporting every computer that can still be useful.
I assume the author is willing to pay all the people who are going to maintain all of those "computers that can still be useful" instead of demanding that they conjure spare time for that out of nowhere.
As much as I share the sentiment of keeping old hardware alive and useful, reality requires a question of "who's going to work on that".
>But, given that Linux is a community-supported operating system that does not need to make a profit, I see no valid reason for it not supporting every computer that can still be useful.
In other words, because it is a community project made by volunteers that earn nothing, there is no valid reason not to demand more unpaid work.
>In a more enlightened society, all products would be supported for as long as they remain useful. The time has come to stop building obsolescence into our computers and make the small effort required to provide user-friendly distributions of Linux that support near-vintage computers.
The only reason this person believes it is a "small effort" is because she has never ever remotely helped doing the effort herself.
I have made such effort myself. I have been part of Linux user groups and helped lots of people. I have experienced myself what is helping enormously someone for only this person demanding more free work and time just because I have already given her free work and time.
We have given talks in the University: If you want to install Linux do research when you buy a computer so it has compatible components because life is much easier and then the same people attending buying incompatible hardware and demanding us to fix it for them, so she could do the classes ' assignments, because that's what we "enjoyed doing".
Linux has done no such thing. The author is complaining about specifically Linux distributions with graphical user interfaces.
"Linux developers are suffering from the Microsoft disease. Namely, they seem to be too busy chasing the latest fads"
This is also a ridiculous statement. It has traditionally always been Microsoft that wasn't chasing the latest fads. Microsoft has always been late to any new developments and technologies. Apple and Linux have always been the first in class there.
If you want a well supported operating system on your old computer, install Windows on it. Don't rely on the work of enthousiasts that are just trying to build the best next thing.
> The time has come to stop building obsolescence into our computers and make the small effort required to provide user-friendly distributions of Linux that support near-vintage computers.
I look forward to seeing the author’s low-resource Linux distribution; since they’ve identified that as a small-effort task, I expect it won’t take them long to ship it.
I'm as opposed to throwing away machines as the author is, but I also recognise that anything with less than 1 GB of RAM is unusable in this day and age. Modern websites are simply too large to handle on such equipment, and most people do their work online.
While I don't agree with the tone, and the expectation that other should ensure that you can keep running a free OS on a 12 year old laptop, there is a point to this website.
I did all the thing I do now 15 years ago on my laptop. Sure video quality have improved, screen resolution have increased and I can do more stuff online, if I want to. All the daily stuff, browsing the web, hobby programming and paying my bills online, why can't I do that with 1 or 2GB of RAM?
We could do 100Mbit networking 15 years ago, or even 20 years ago, so the increased network speed shouldn't be an issue.
Hobby programming and paying bills are relatively lightweight tasks. Using cloud document editors and social media definitely isn't. At best, your computer will have noticable latency and at worst it'll crawl so slowly it's unusable. Check out https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm for some thoughts on this topic that align with mine.
The network speed is by no means an issue. The problem is that all websites feel the need to mess with their DOM and execute megabytes of JavaScript just to do basic tasks. Then your bottleneck becomes the processor speed and the amount of RAM, the latter a larger obstacle in my experience.
A Raspberry Pi 1 with 256MB works very well with Pi-hole. It has a lot of free RAM to spare.
I think your posts underlines an important fact: Nowadays more and more tasks require an up-to-date internet browser. These browsers need a lot of RAM. Both their complexity and the websites' is increasing all the time.
Works with Pi-hole as a server, or as a web client? If the latter, I will vehemently disagree. Raspberry Pi 1 was slow with native apps during the time it was released, to use it with the modern web would be painful.
There is a perfectly modern Debian distribution available as 32bit. I put this on a 12 years old computer. Yes, that's not 20 years old, but the architecture is largely the same.
GNU userspace as well as the Linux kernels have not abandoned 32bit x86.
This is true, however some devices including floppies, tape, and optical media have been made impossible, more difficult, and/or inconvenient to use with modern kernels.
And then there's throwing away 386 compatibility in 2012 and now they want to nuke a bunch more.
I was also surprised that Debian was not the list of distributions they tried. That would be the first one I would reach for in this situation, and indeed is running fine for me on a VPC 256MB of RAM (although it is a 64bit CPU).
Finding a version of Linux that works isn't an issue. Finding a web browser that's usable on an old version of Linux, with today's web might be an issue. But that's not unique to Linux.
I have to believe he can find a Linux distro that would work, subject to whatever support limitations there were at the time (which could be pretty significant 20 years ago). But he may not be able to do much with it, including connecting to the network with any level of security.
I am finding NetBSD works better on old computers than Linux. The differences are not too great. They are basically all based on the same POSIX standards.
yes, both NetBSD and OpenBSD i386 works great on Old Computers and take very little space, I have OpenBSD on a Thinkpad R51e (circa 2007) and had NetBSD on a circa 1999 desktop (512 mb mem) which sadly is slowly fading away (hardware).
Also both have solved the 2038 problem on 32 bit systems years ago. I think Linux is very close to solving it (or may have already), but that is for newer kernels. I expect Linux will probably drop 32 bit support with in a few years.
I've recently tried to give new life to and old Pentium 166MMX with 80MB of RAM.
It has Windows 2000 installed and I tried many small Linux distributions. DSL runs fine.
You have to lower your expectations, but you can have a nice little system to play around with. You also won't have a modern browser, but, even if you did, you wouldn't have enough RAM or CPU to use most sites.
My conclusion is that if you want to keep such a machine working, you would have to find some specific job for it to do, such as monitoring, honeypot, playing a specific game, text editing, etc.
Try compiling a modern TLS under /opt, compile and link a new mbedtls library, and try compiling Dillo from Mercurial.
Edit ~/.dillo/dillorc in order to set the User Agent to either PSP or Opera Mini 3. Or better, Lynx. The Lynx one.
Web pages got lovely formatted where supported:
Hm. Interesting site, but reading the recommended configuration I'm wondering what they mean by m68060@100Mhz? FPGA, one of the maybe few 100s turbocards worldwide, or what? :-)
On Delicate Linux, once you get libressl at /opt and try to configure mbedtls to read "libressl" before SSL, Dillo would have a modern crypto stack and it would be really good for old machines.
As I'm learning Cobol (banking), and Forth with 4th, that machine would be really useful to me in 2021. As for gaming, slashem will run on that for sure, and IF games run on anything with a 386/68020 and beyond.
So the author complains that there are linuxes that run on vintage hardware, but they're not usable by novice linux users. The problem, I guess, is that linux on vintage hardware is too inaccessible to people coming from windows, but all the accessible distros are bloated from too much "Microsoft disease?"
Perhaps the features you want are a byproduct of this "disease" then? If you don't want bloated software you may need to get off the bloated software express train and learn how to use something a little more esoteric.
I'm running Sparkylinux on literally that exact model and vintage of Dell laptop and it works fine. It came with an installer and booted fine off of USB, I'm not sure what the problem is. How many vintage hardware aficionados are there who are also unwilling to learn anything new about computers?
The irony for me is that they're not being asked to learn something new, they're being asked to learn something vintage.
A full modern gnome/KDE desktop environment might be a lot more user-friendly than, eg, blackbox - but they also price you out of the 20-year-old laptop. OP wants to have their cake and eat it - and they can, but it will require a bigger plate.
I apologize, I may have commented a little rashly. I just double checked and it is actually an Inspiron 600m (which I believe is even more vintage than the 5100?)
It wasn't originally in my plans for this weekend, but your comment got me concerned I may have misremembered other details. I just tried installing (32 bit) 5.14 off a USB stick and it did, indeed, work just fine. Sorry you had trouble with your config :(
I have old computers, Raspberry Pi's, and virtual machine cloud instances with just 128MB to 512MB RAM and they work perfectly fine for the tasks I use them for. None of those tasks involve anything graphical.
If you want a modern web browser then you need a computer made in the last 10 years or so. The statement that "It's just a browser!" is not a good argument. The modern web is very resource intensive so you need a decent computer.
10 year old laptops with 2 RAM slots can take 16 GB RAM (32 GB for the 4-slot desktop replacements), you don't even need to find some esoteric artisan slimline Linux distribution, you can just slap Ubuntu/Fedora on it and call it a day.
> The statement that "It's just a browser!" is not a good argument. The modern web is very resource intensive so you need a decent computer.
The modern web is resource intensive, but not that resource intensive, unless you insist on keeping a myriad of tabs open and active.
A Linux desktop with half a dozen webapps open in Chrome (and more tabs suspended) can still stay under 3GB RAM used (I'm clocking in at 2.2 right now), so it's still viable on 32 bit hardware.
3GB RAM dualcore notebooks were available 15 years ago, and for the past ten years you could retrofit them with SSDs for reasonably cheap.
Both together are like 150 bucks according to a brief ebay survey, that's a very low bar for "decent".
You won't need Plasma or XFCE. For sure. Deselect them,
as lightweight apps are more than enough.
Setup Slackbuild thru sbotools.
Then, sboinstall icewm and configure it:
- IceWM. Edit the preferences so the fonts
match the GTK3 theme. "fc-list | grep fontname"
will help you on that.
- Some matching IceWM and GTK3/2 theme. Metal2 from
IceWM matches perfectly the Solaris 8 theme from B00merang, Google/DDG it.
- XFE as the file manager, the colour scheme can
be changed with ease so it matches the GTK3 colours.
- "udiskie &" in ~/.icewm/startup.
- "nm-applet &" appended to the same file.
- Seamonkey as the web browser, with UBo Legacy.
- AlienBOB has a Chromium build, and I have a huge envvar for Chromium in order to be run fast on machines with at least 1GB of RAM. It's too large in order to be posted here, but I can post it under a separate self-answer to this post.
- Audacious as the audio player, SMplayer for videos.
- For gaming, Slackware has several Slackbuilds with light games. And Wine with multilib.
- Ted/Gnumeric make an amazing and lightweight alternative to LibreOffice.
+1 for IceWM. It's ridiculously fast and lightweight while retaining a bare minimum of what it needs to be usable. I rarely touch computers as old as the one in the original blog post, but a simple Debian/IceWM setup will fly on things like netbooks with 1 GB RAM.
I suggest MOC as an alternative music player and mpv for videos.
Can't get used to IceWM on multi-screen setups. Fluxbox works better with those(for me), especially different screen sizes and resolutions. Regarding media players, why use anything else besides mpv at all? Doesn't matter if started manually with some playlist, or out of some filemanager, regardless if from (framebuffer)console, some X-terminal emulator, or X itself.
Works, anytime, for anything.
Most modern distros are 'kitchen sink' distros in that they cater for the majority of cases. And in doing that, they work very well.
However, they don't cater for every situation, every computer that exists. So somebody will be needed to cater for those few cases that aren't covered by mainstream distros.
Now, that somebody has to have good knowledge of Linux and be able to recompile/rewrite whatever is needed for that idiosyncratic distro that works for that particular edge case.
If a few people insist on using an uncommon computer, they have to take on the responsibility of keeping mainstream Gnu Linux working on those particular computers. Or else be satisfied with the older versions of Gnu Linux that were working previously on those computers.
ASIDE: I like making emulators of old 8-bit computers. But I don't try to make those old computers use modern software, they use the CP/M software that was extant at the time those 8-bit computers were made.
I could probably make a Linux desktop distribution run smoothly on pretty much all the legacy hardware I haven't thrown away in fifteen years. That does not make said hardware useful, because every time I had to upgrade was due to web browsing getting slower and slower.
Edit: Quite a few other folks in this comment section seem to have pointed out basically the same thing.
One and only problem with old Laptops is that you cannot just replace the CDROM-drive with Raspberry Pi and call it a day. Because VNC is too slow. There must be some handy way to connect the display. I know you can order HDMI-to-display boards from Alibaba, but this requires dismantling the laptop. Not handy enuff I say.
Edit: I know exactly what would be the optimal solution and it is two-port SATA drive. Rasberry and the old Laptop would share the same drive. Even I could write necessary routines starting from "scrot". And other I/O like keyboard and touchpad would be equally easy. But no two-port drives in Ebay.
The most important problem with keeping old computers running is their carbon footprint. Modern machines are much cheaper to run for the same performance, and even considering the construction of new devices an always on devices needs to be modern and lower power. I've replaced an old Asus nettop PC with a Raspberry Pi 4, and electricity usage has dropped from 30W to single digit power consumption.
On the other hand, I saw some research that says that the power consumption of those older devices in use is dwarfed by the power used to make them, or to make a newer computer, so, as with cars, the right thing to do is keep them running as long as you can. I spent a little bit of time looking for the reference, but it was on gopher a couple of years ago, and I wasn't able to find it.
On an individual level there's another angle: Wait to long and you run into the point where other people are scrapping newer, more efficient machines. At that point, picking one of those up is increasing your efficiency.
I still run debian 32-bit on a P3 1GHz machine reasonably often - it's a legacy PC for gaming. Has 3DFX cards and everything!
Old windows of that vintage can no longer talk modern SMB but Debian i386 can just fine, so I boot debian on it to transfer data from the internet or other modern machines. LXDE is perfectly usable, although I admit I haven't tried a web browser in some time.
They want somebody to write, test and maintain a distribution that works without bugs and easy enough for newbies, on an almost bottomless pit of historical hardware.
You can have this. It's easy. Just hire a developer or two. Oh, you want it for free too?!
You don't have to argue with the many technical issues in the post, the author doesn't deserve the oxygen.
Fund and have a legacy devices and architecture team that takes over support when things become too rare or obsolete. Legacy that can build on or with stable or mainline without impacting current development. Vintage computing or even moderately-recent computing shouldn't be thrown under the bus to chase consumerism only.
I really don't understand the point the author is trying to make. If you have old hardware just use a lightweight distro, or an older version of one of the more popular ones.
If running new software is so important just buy a new computer!?
Unfortunately, while a 2002-era distro is likely to be a good match to 2002-era hardware, you may be exposed to 19 years’ worth of accumulated security vulnerabilities.
In an era where a vintage computer is the equivalent of a $35 Raspberry Pi in terms of compute and memory, the rationale to support the former, from an OS perspective, seems incredibly weak.
Keeping support for near 20 year old consumer grade machines in the kernel seems ridiculous to me. Doing so would bloat the size of the kernel even more than it already is. The more code you have the easier it is for bugs and vulnerabilities to creep in.
When people write articles about moving old computers to windows to Linux they generally don't mean 20 year machines. You wouldn't even be able to run a modern browser with 256 mb of ram
Yes, but those modules need to be maintained as the kernel is updated. If a specific architecture’s tree is abandoned, it would make sense to remove it from the tree until someone picks it up again.
The problem: once something is removed from the tree, it is almost impossible to get it back in, since whoever wants to do that has to replay the extreme amounts of refactorings done since the removal.
The Linux kernel famously only guarantees outside stability of interfaces, but in-kernel interfaces are regularly changed - one might suspect intentionally, to make the lives of people doing off-kernel work (such as graphics card drivers) as difficult as possible so that they will eventually open source their code and ship it in the kernel.
How’s that any different than keeping it updated while it’s in the tree? If it’s stale and someone comes along to fix it, it’ll be in the same state it was when it would’ve been removed. Stale code needs to be updated regardless of where it came from.
Vintage used to mean something 50+ years old, but now it means 20+ years old. Antique used to mean 100+ years old, but now it means something covered in dust.
What’s wrong with installing WinXP+office and calling it a day? Even if someone fulfilled your request and got an up-to-date browser etc working on your 256MB laptop Would YouTube even work?
This problem exists because people, like this author, who are in to vintage systems aren't taking up the mantle to maintain a distribution to support their old systems. It's like they want the benefit with zero effort. Become a leader, start the work and organize a community to take your favorite distribution and make it work on your legacy system.