[forinti]

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.

[anthk]

This has software a bit newer than Damn Small Linux: http://delicate-linux.net/

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:

         http_user_agent="Lynx/2.8.9rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1k"

Also, edit ~/.dillo/dillorc in order to make cookies work. For example:

    DEFAULT DENY
   .news.ycombinator.com ACCEPT
   .news.ycombinator.com ACCEPT_SESSION

Bam!! Modernish web "support" for your browser. HN should work, and a lot more too.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

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? :-)

[anthk]

They had some release for m68k machines I think.

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.