I need some help finding a distro for a very old machine.
It’s my family’s old desktop with 2001 components (bought in 2004) and a Pentium CPU that is NOT i686. I checked the exact model and architecture once but I don’t remember it now. The only thing I remember is that it’s not i686 so 99% of modern 32 bit distros don’t work on it (stuck right after grub).
The machine has 1 Gb of DDR1 RAM though so I think it may be useful or at least fun to play around with.
Now it’s on Windows XP that runs quite well but doesn’t support modern SSL certificates so it can’t browse the internet (idk how to fix it ok?).
A long time ago I tried to run multiple distros in live mode on it and got only one (Puppy) to work. Display, sound, ethernet and pretty much everything worked fine. GPU seemed to be an issue though because NVidia and I couldn’t install the driver (it was skill issue and I think it’s possible to do). But now it doesn’t work for some reason.
Are there any Linux distros or other operating systems (preferably not deprecated) that I can install on it? And btw it does have bootable USB support.
Tiny Core would probably run on it.
I have it on a PII 333MHz with 192MB of RAM from 1999. It grinds to a halt if I try to open pretty much any modern website though.
I just checked it and it seems to be an independent distro. Does it have a repo or do I have to compile everything I want to install?
If you do compile something, it is very easy to make it an installable package you could share. I’m not sure how the repos are managed
It has a repo with programs you can install. The selection is fairly limited though.
http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/doku.php?id=wiki:install_apps
That computer is in the basement and I’m not having any luck finding a list of what’s available.
Hmm I can’t find a browseable repo so idk if there’s anything useful for it but I might check it out. Thanks
the repos are browsable inside the package manager - I would imagine they are browsable outside as well, but I have never had cause to do so.
honestly, give tinycore a shot. fire it up in a VM and take a look around - it really is an amazingly useful distro.
Maybe let go of this ancient hardware? Seriously: Get a Raspberry Pi (or whatever SOC computer is the latest trend) and install whatever distribution you want. You get 100x the performance for 100x less power consumption. It’s great to reuse old hardware and all, but THAT old?
It’s just for experiments and learning. Why judging? Also a Pi is like $100 here and it is a big deal for me
A long time ago I tried to run multiple distros in live mode on it and got only one (Puppy) to work. Display, sound, ethernet and pretty much everything worked fine. GPU seemed to be an issue though because NVidia and I couldn’t install the driver (it was skill issue and I think it’s possible to do). But now it doesn’t work for some reason.
Puppy linux has 3 versions, based on different distros. Maybe you tried one version back then, and now a different one?
I know and I think I tried the same version
Looks like a whole bunch of conversation about this topic can be found here:
Perhaps openbsd or netbsd? They’re probably less likely to drop hardware support for your device in the near future than any linux distribution
Freebsd is also an option but you would have to compile it yourself as the prebuilt binaries are currently 686 despite it having support back to 486
BSD is an option but I heard it’s slower and idk anything about how it works and how to install it
Void with Xfce has done wonders to my atom cpu with 2 GB of ram. Also iceWM has seen a new release that might worth checking
Void doesn’t support the CPU architecture of that machine
Dunno if it would work or not, but I wonder if a minimal NixOS install would work.
I think it’s easier to write your own kernel from scratch than learning how to install something in Nix lol
