Posted on 10/31/2009 6:32:14 AM PDT by Clint Williams
cptdondo writes
"I've got an old laptop that I've been trying to resurrect. It has a 486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM, a 720 MB HD, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 640x480 VESA video. It does not have a CD drive, USB port, or a network port. It has PCMCIA, and I have a network card for that. My goal is to get a minimal GUI that lets me run a basic browser like Dillo and open a couple of xterms. I've spent the last few days trying to find a Linux distro that will work on that machine. I've done a lot of work on OpenWRT, so naturally I though that would work, but X appears to be broken in the recent builds — I can't get the keyboard to work. (OK, not surprising; OpenWRT is made to run on WiFi Access Point hardware which doesn't have a keyboard...) All of the 'mini' distros come as a live CD; useless on a machine without a CD-ROM. Ditto for the USB images. I'm also finding that the definition of a 'mini' distro has gotten to the point of 'It fits on a 3GB partition and needs 128 MB RAM to run.' Has Linux really become that bloated? Do we really need 2.2 GB of cruft to bring up a simple X session? Is there a distro that provides direct ext2 images instead of live CDs?"
I have a stripped down version of Windows7 that runs on 50KB of RAM so anything is possible. :O)
You need a really old version of Red Hat.
Take a look at Peanut Linux or Damn Small Linux
I've thrown away better stuff than that!
Get a distro from the same century as your CPU and try that.
Several years ago I also faced finding a Linux distribution I could load on an ancient laptop. Debian was the only one I could find.
Here is a link to their Laptop install guide:
http://www.tuxmobil.org/Mobile-Guide.db/Mobile-Guide.html
He could get a copy of 98lite and make a tiny installation of windows 98 that would probably work.
Maybe Puppy Linux? Their Wiki and discussion forums might be worth looking at. This sounds like the sort of thing they do.
Hi, you’ve got perfect timing! Just yesterday I downloaded the latest version of Puppy Linux and it is even more amazing that the last. The entire distro will only occupy 1/6th of a CDROM and runs very nicely on an old Dell 450mhz machine that I tried it on, and that is running completely from the CD. It’s so small, quick, and fast that it can run very nicely in a virtual machine, if you’re into that, or from a USB stick.
The latest version of Seamonkey browswer is included, along with a bunch of apps, games, utilities, etc. This is a tabbed browser from Mozilla that feels just like Firefox, but has built-in mail and news readers.
I got Puppy right up and running with a few clicks to configure the ethernet for DHCP but there’s full wireless support also. And I downloaded and added a game that I like with a fully automated installl (just like Windoze) which has always been my pet peeve with Linux.
Try it, I guarantee you’ll be impressed.
book marked ..
The only thing that would work is old distributions such as Red Hat, Slackware and even old copies of FreeBSD or OpenBSD.
Your target of running in 28 megabytes is mighty small, but I have run DSL on several small memory machines successfully (though I don't think that I have tried DSL on any machine with only 28 megabytes) and the DSL web page claims that it will run in 16 megabytes: Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram.
You can install a minimal version of Debian on pretty much any old machine you can find. You just install “Standard” from the task list.
If you want X, just install twm or icewm after installation.
It should all fit in a few hundred MB.
Reference bump! ;-)
Debian/Mepis -based AntiX is all set to do that. It runs great on my old Celeron laptop but I don’t know about the 486.
I have a better machine in my garage waiting to be recycled
Looks to me like the biggest problem is lack of a CDrom. These days noone uses floppies, so modern installers aren’t set up to use them, and the distros aren’t split into 1.44 MB ISOs. IIRC, there were parallel port cdroms available back in the day. If you had a system like this, that might be your best bet, though I doubt the BIOS would be configured to boot from the parallel port. DSL would run on a minimalist box like the OP mentioned, but the issue of trying to get the OS on the drive is kinda chicken and eggish.
My brother has a pretty old computer and I was wondering the same thing. It does have a CD drive and somehow manages to run on Windows 95, though I have no idea how.
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