[HN Gopher] A Tale of Running Modern Linux on Hardware from 1997
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A Tale of Running Modern Linux on Hardware from 1997
Author : oedmarap
Score : 55 points
Date : 2022-08-11 12:52 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sahajsarup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sahajsarup.com)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Nobody would have had 256MB of RAM on a Pentium 100 in 1997.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Indeed, my P75 was using 32MB, if memory serves me right.
| forinti wrote:
| I think most consumer machines had 16MB.
|
| I bought a P166MMX in 1996 with 64MB. The motherboard would max
| out at 192MB.
| initramfs wrote:
| I agree- my friend at school had a Pentium 200Mhz with 16MB of
| RAM, and I only had 8 for several years. Since Tinycore needs
| around 48MB of RAM it would be interesting to try out something
| like Tiny Slitaz, which can run on 4MB:
| https://pizza.slitaz.org/tiny/
| angrygoat wrote:
| The first PC I bought myself was a P2-400 with 128MB of RAM and
| an 11GB hard drive. I ran stock Debian, dual-boot W2K, and I had
| (just) enough hard drive for a full Debian i386 mirror (with
| source) so that I didn't need to download packages over my 56k
| modem.
|
| Strange to read in this blog post that contemporary Linux distros
| wouldn't be at all useful on this hardware. I know they do a lot
| more, but the core of what I could do on that PC wasn't that much
| less than now: or maybe that's just nostalgia speaking?
| bombcar wrote:
| Much of what we do now can and was done on older machines, in
| fact we off-load much more to the "cloud" than we did then.
|
| But time moves forward and driver support is often removed (if
| not from the kernel, then from the distro).
|
| If you install headless and are willing to compile your own
| kernel and deal with some configuration fun, you can probably
| get most anything to run.
|
| I suspect half the distros that "failed" could be made to work
| with some fiddling in the BIOS or changing kernel command line
| options (which I remember doing even back then).
| forinti wrote:
| Nice. I recently tried a few small distros on a P166MMX with 80MB
| of RAM.
|
| The best one turned out to be DSL.
|
| Unfortunately, I could only get wifi using Win2K because of the
| driver and then IE can't handle current SSL protocols and most
| sites don't work.
|
| I really liked using SPARCStations back in the day, and the
| amount of software available on them was probably a lot less than
| what even DSL offers. I guess we've become used to having a lot
| of software very easily available, so retro hardware seems a bit
| dull.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| Slackware might have worked too. I haven't tried Slackware 15,
| but when i was developing Post Apocalyptic Petra[0] (a DOS game
| for an MSDOS game jam) a couple of years ago and was trying to do
| some performance profiling, i did try the immediate previous
| version of Slackware in 86box emulating a 300MHz Pentium MMX[1]
| and it worked fine (though sadly "prof" didn't work since it
| required some functionality introduced in later CPUs, so i
| couldn't do the profiling).
|
| I do remember that i had to replace a file in the ISO for it to
| boot (it was a mistake on Slackware's side and there was a patch
| for it in the forums) but i think this was patched in "current"
| so Slackware 15 should not need it.
|
| [0] https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/4X7lvZ7.png
| [deleted]
| causi wrote:
| I had quite a hard time at this same task when I was trying to
| run Linux on my old Thinkpad 700 a decade ago. I believe Slitaz
| was the only distro I got to boot.
| smm11 wrote:
| Retro. I don't just run such stuff at home, I still support
| mid-90s stuff 9-5.
| sbf501 wrote:
| > I have been interested in retro hardware for a long time.
|
| Retro.
|
| 1997.
|
| Cries in 8088.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In 1997 I was using a Pentium 75, what were you doing with an
| 8088?!?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Would you have called the 8088 retro in 1997? Because a '79
| vintage 8088 in '97 would be more recent than that '97 machine
| is now.
| bombcar wrote:
| In 1997 many machines in common usage were still running DOS
| (even if they were a 386 or even a 486) - so the 8088
| wouldn't have looked as "retro" perhaps.
|
| But even a few short years later everyone was on Windows 98SE
| or XP and the DOS machines began to look seriously retro.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| Now I want to cry too.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Perhaps if we scaled time by Moore's law. :)
|
| In that case, the distance from 1979 to 1997 is much longer
| than 1997 to 2022.
| forinti wrote:
| The 80s were crazy. In 1981 you got a ZX81 with 1KB of RAM.
| In 1985 the Amiga came out.
|
| Then in the late 90s I remember RAM doubling every year.
|
| From about 2010 onwards, things have gotten slower.
| sbf501 wrote:
| I was looking it at from the product point of view.
|
| The time between the 8088, 286, 386, 486, Pentium spans
| nearly two decades.
|
| Now intel churns out a dozen new SKUs a year. Granted
| they are all variations on the same silicon as the
| process improves, but it is far more accelerated than in
| the past.
| bsedlm wrote:
| I hope that by the time a PC with keyboard and mouse (or even a
| laptop with trackpad and keyboard) are considered retro I am
| able to stay away from all computers.
|
| because on this trend, such a world where all computing is
| through 'smart' devices is a world in which we have even less
| individual power than we do now.
| sbf501 wrote:
| Unfortunately, I think in the world you describe, you will be
| immersed in 100x more computers, they will just be smaller,
| and everywhere (possibly inside you).
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Overheard the other day:
|
| > Tupac, a rapper from the 1900's
| the_only_law wrote:
| Wait till you find out the debate about XP era machines being
| retro.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Recently I heard a Windows 7-era machine being called very
| old. I gained a grey hair or two just hearing this.
| sponaugle wrote:
| No doubt retro is a broad term, and perhaps it is reasonable
| for the term to follow the experience of the speaker. I have
| a reasonable collection of retro-hardware, but it does span a
| wide time span. The oldest would be the Kaypro, Osborn, and a
| few other Z80 late 70s machines, following through with all
| of the key IBMs of the 80s (PC, XT, XT/286, AT, PS/2), plus a
| sampling of the Mac lines from the original 128K Mac up
| through a few Quadras, Amiga, Commodore, Atari, etc.
|
| For me they are all 'retro', but I tend to think of the
| interesting stuff to be the things from my childhood - so the
| Commodore, TI, Amiga, Atari, IBM PC, Televideo, etc.
|
| It is interesting to see the enthusiasm of people building
| 'retro' XP machine. For some of them it represents the
| platform they grew up with. For us old folks it is more like
| that OS we were using for work some time ago.
|
| I did just build up a reasonably authentic Pentium 100
| machine in a configuration that was very close to the Pentium
| 100 machine I used when I worked at Intel during that
| processors release. Fun times.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| I thought the cutoff was 1 generation, or ~15 years.
|
| Everything before the iPhone is "retro".
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I don't think there is really much of a debate, anything
| older than around 15 to 20 year (depending on who you ask,
| there isn't really a hard threshold) is pretty much retro.
| E.g. nowadays an Xbox 360 or PS3 console (both released
| around mid-2000s) is considered a retro console and you can
| find them in various retro YouTube channels. Even the games
| released for them have a distinct "feel" and visual style.
|
| WinXP, released in 2001, is full-on retro :-P.
|
| It might sound weird if you grew up to think retro as
| machines like ZX Spectrum, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Apple 2,
| etc but time does move forward and with it also does the
| concept of what is retro :-) (and those machines are retro
| too of course :-P).
| hotpotamus wrote:
| WinXP probably should feel weird in that it's life is
| exactly in your range for retro. The original release was
| 2001, so over 20 years, but service pack 3 was 2008, 14
| years ago. And EOL for extended support was 2014, and if
| memory serves they even pushed out a couple patches after
| for big vulnerabilities. You could even edit the registry
| and pretend to be XP embedded to get more updates.
|
| It was a long lived OS which is why it's debatable.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I don't think it makes much sense to use the latest
| update dates as any sort of indication for that though,
| old stuff with updates is still old (e.g. a simple way to
| think of it, fixing some old radio from the 20s wont make
| it any less old unless you change the entire mechanism
| and even then assuming you didn't modify that, the
| "interface" would still be the same).
|
| It might have been long lived but the overall user
| experience didn't change much between the original
| release and the very last release. You can see a
| screenshot or even a video of the original WinXP and the
| last WinXP patch and they'd look and feel almost the
| same.
|
| On a similar note, when people play around with 90s retro
| PCs, they often install software, patches and drivers
| released in the early 2000s (or even late 2000s or
| sometimes recent stuff) - that doesn't make these
| machines any less "90s PCs" either.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'd just say software is a bit different than hardware.
| Hardware is quite fixed in time while software is ever
| changing. XP is really just an iteration of WinNT to
| unify MS's home and enterprise codebases and XP was
| really just a point in time snapshot of the code on its
| way from NT through to 11 today.
| sponaugle wrote:
| It is amazing what collections of this newer-old hardware
| is still around. It is easy to find things like the early
| PCI video cards, accelerators like the 3dfx Voodoo, and
| even some classics like the awesomely(at the time)
| overclockable Celeron 300 on ebay or in garage sales. It is
| perhaps even more amazing to see how many 5150s and 5160s
| are still operational!
| rjsw wrote:
| I can run NetBSD-current on a Macintosh Quadra 950 from 1992.
| sponaugle wrote:
| Indeed, NetBSD is a great option for so many older platforms.
| It is especially useful for those collections of late 80s-90s
| 'Microprocessor Wars' era machines. (Sparcs, MIPS, PA-Risc,
| PowerPC, X86).
| rjsw wrote:
| I was just describing my oldest machine that I know works, my
| SPARCstation2 is older but hasn't been powered up for a long
| time.
| hulitu wrote:
| He is trying to run a very modern kernel which has PATA emulation
| support. I guess that a lot of older drivers are just not
| implemented. Also AFAIK a lot of distros only support i686 due to
| glibc being compiled with SSE support. I would start with an
| older distro and try to upgrade glibc and maybe the kernel.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Grub2?!
|
| Use grub and it'll work much better on old hardware
| jaclaz wrote:
| grub4dos would IMHO be even better, it is a derivative of grub
| with an endless list of added features.
| dTal wrote:
| It's not quite "retro" in the same sense, but I used to run
| Debian on a Zipit Z2 handheld computer as a daily driver. The CPU
| was a respectable 312Mhz ARM, but it only had 32Mb of RAM. X11
| ran like a dog, but it was a perfectly functional machine if you
| stuck to the command line. It'd even compile software, provided
| it was written in C and not C++. This was around 2010.
|
| I doubt you'd get any "mainstream" distros to run on it now, much
| less Debian. The bloat is real.
| incanus77 wrote:
| I have gotten BasicLinux to run on a 386SX with 8MB of RAM. No
| networking, and it requires loading from a DOS boot first, but
| it's Linux!
|
| https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Unfortunately, modern versions of Linux have removed 386
| support because it led to complications wrt. SMP handling code.
| It would be nice to try and restore it, perhaps for
| uniprocessor systems only (SMP config option off) which most
| 386 systems probably are.
| initramfs wrote:
| My first PC was Windows 95 on a Packard bell 100Mhz Pentium
| with 8MB RAM. It had 16 bit color with 1 MB of video RAM, and
| yet a GUI is really hard to do today with that amount of RAM.
| I would like to see an OS today do that.
| https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS
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(page generated 2022-08-11 23:01 UTC)