“What? Are you nuts? Running SuSE 8.2 Linux Professional on a 150 Mhz Pentium? That will never work. That’s exactly what I did do and it did work, admirably.” Read the article at LinuxPlanet.
SuSE Linux Demonstrates Old PCs Still Have Use
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I have a K6 II 450Mhz machine running Mandrake Linux 8.0 that is acting as a file server (NFS and SAMBA), NAT, DHCP and Firewall.
Runs like a charm. Ran for 9 months without a reboot until a friend plugged his laser printer into the UPS and drained it in like 5 seconds.
Been up and running for months since then with narry a reboot or trouble.
This is true about linux, certainly, but since when does a computer with a P150 also have a graphics card that is still supported by XFree86 4.3.0? The reviewer is lucky to have the right combo of stuff! Good for SuSE.
Oh I did install RH8 in a first generation VAIO desktop (P166, 64MB, ATI 3DRage), but Bluecurve GNOME took around 2 minutes to boot up but it was still usable.
Even having Knoppix on these machines can do wonders.
Compared to my 2 P90s i’m running. I installed Gentoo on 2 identical 90MHz Pentiums, and they are running as DNS servers. They run so incredibly well because they don’t have ANYTHING I don’t need. No X, no sound drivers, no hardware detection, etc. They will soon be taking the load of approx 1000+ DNS queries per day (not a whole lot), and I know they’ll handle it just fine. Linux makes great use of old hardware.
Knoppix IS amazing. It does so much, and runs amazingly fast for being run off of such a relatively slow medium (CD-ROM), and being decompressed on the fly.
10GB harddisk, 192MB RAM, 600MHz, etc.
Will be much faster than that for sure 😉
I think it takes a lot of courage and patience to install a modern OS on some old hardware. I would have thrown the computer out of the window (<- real window) if I have to wait a min to get my DE load up.
Of course it is an interesting article.
My old system is still my system…
PII 400 / 384 MB Ram, 12 GB hd…
Just installed SuSE 8.2 last night and it runs great, looks great too!
a p150 is not the end of the world. Sure it won’t run most stuff fast but computers like that are getting used for routers and stuff by people all the time. Check out ebay and see how much a socket 7 mobo with cpu and some ram under say 200 mhz goes for, it’s a heck of a lot more then you think.
I was using a P2 400mhz till a few months ago, it ran XP and stuff fine.
But never the less these computers are going to steadily be considered worthless to most. It’s nice to find something to do with them. Sure you can pick them up from street corners and such and just start expanding your linux cluster and run seti or folding or something like that. But even then you have ot balance that verses using one 2 ghz athlon instead of a pile of 486 and P1’s when you think of the power to run it and hassle.
So then maybe you think fixing them up for schools, well most schools are run and and attended by people who tossed that computer you fixed up to the curb, they don’t want it either.
On the flip side any computer that is using hardware with a spec sheet containing things like ATX power, sdram, ps/2, usb and not AT power, vdo ram, AT, serial, is basicly a modern computer and can be built up to a decent level since it’s very modern compatable. Those computers are also pretty powerfull and can be used, whereas a old 486 tandy isn’t good for a whole lot since there is nothing any body wants that will run on it. For them it’s the dumpster. For now the world seams to be absorbing old hardware into places, but thats not going to last for ever. And as long as people are continously getting new computers, there is going to be a lot of waste buiding up. And often it’s waste that is perfectly good.
Running linux on a old computer isn’t going to get to many people very much, sure maybe a computer person in need, but for many it’s like giving a half running 84 dodge aries to a person without a car, to them the idea of walking just seams better then the car (a thanks but no thanks).
had like 6 months uptime until a dumb@ss removed the fuse :^]
I just installed Slack 9 on a P133 for my personal use, will put it under the kitchen sink so I can leave it running at night
Btw, SuXe(oops, sorry
Linux isn’t the only version of Linux, nor the only OS able to make use of old hardware.
I installed once BeOs on a P133 with 8M (yeah, thrashed a bit, but it did work
And I’ll use my K6-2 350 as compile “farm” with Zeta soon. (btw beta5 is ready now).
When Linux gets more and more popular, I hope that people will finally start to realize, that they don’t really need 3Ghz P4’s for word prosessing.
Luckily a lot of people are beginning to see, that there isn’t really such need for huge prosessor power. Basicly, a 500mhz computer is more than enough for just about any task, except the newest 3D-games. And you can always get a console, that runs the same games as your 2000€ Pentium, bust costs only 200€. I hope that this means problems for the Wintel-monopoly in the future, because games have always been the best way to sell new hardware. I guess M$ realized this with their Xflopx-attemp, but it was way overpriced.
Anyway, nowdays when practically every modern computer, PC, Mac, AmigaOne or whatever, is up to the task of running just about every application the average user needs, so it’s sad to see how most people still live in the Planet Microsoft and are willing to pay fortunes of upgrading their hard- and software just to run the latest Windows XP/Office XP which only have crappy new features that no-one really needs.
Back in the golden age of Amiga 500,when the prosessor power was limited and the machine stayed the same, software developers were forced to optimize the code, and imo the did a pretty darn good job. They did things that even people who developed the Amiga 500 could not have believed true back when they put the first A500 together. It would be a blessing to the personal computer industy if we were stuck with the same hardware for the next 5 years….well, blessing for the user, nightmare to the hardware industry. It would certainly force even the Redmond-engineers to put up or shut up – optimize or bust.
I suggest ZipSlack, it fits on 100M hdd
> And you can always get a console, that runs the same games as your 2000 Pentium, bust costs only 200.
You can also get an XBox and install Linux on it, it costs much less and does way more
Besides my old K6-2 350 did more in BeOS than my actual dual cel would in XP.
and BeOS is much more fun to program for:
http://www.bebits.com/app/3410
I have slackware running on my network monitor box which can’t be more than 75 mhz and it runs beautifully aside from the hard drive going crazy every couple of weeks(The drive is about to go)
I also have slackware acting as a wireless to wired ethernet gateway on a machine that can’t be more than 150mhz in the rafters of my girlfriends garage. Waiting for linux-2.4.21 which should resolve some problems with her wireless nic, but aside from that the system works great.
A lot of old machines can be made to run network related applications great with Linux on them. Even my webserver which is an old toshiba laptop(pentium 2 MX 233) is running gentoo Linux, and that works just beautifully.
It’s a good thing that Linux came along, because if it didn’t I wouldn’t be able to take people’s old junk machines and actually put them to a good use as easily
This Athlon XP1600+ Redhat system might just see me past 2015 if the reviewer’s experience is true. I must admit that I’ve been able to get Redhat 8 running pretty favourable on a Pentium 160Mhz 48Mb, 512k Display card. etc.
Congrats!
I totally see the point of the article, but it is interesting that the author chose a distro that costs $70. I think you can get a new computer from Walmart for $200 with Lindows on it. Use a free distro when you want to demostrate how you can use your old computer, or your return on investment is pretty low.
Thats right!
Why should anyone use these new shine computers to consult a db and setup one invoice?
Why give to many people that are supposed to use a word processor and consult the clients data, one super fast and power hungry computer if they can do their jobs perfectly well with machines starting with, maybe, 200 MHz?
I do think that many of these “garbage” really can be used until the end of their lifes. Of course, if something goes wrong with them (hardware), use it in your “garage sale” and buy another one.
And it runs OK. I had to upgrade the RAM to 80MB to get it to be usable with Mozilla and anything else open.
However, it is rock-stable, and runs my desktop (WindowMaker, ROX-Filer) and apps (NEdit, GIMP, Sodipodi, Blender and my own apps) quite acceptably.
The performance of either of the 2 main DEs for Linux is simply abysmal on this machine. GNOME2 and KDE3 are both quite useless for getting anything whatsoever done.
Linux itself is great on older hardware – I still have 486-DX266s doing useful work – but you have to do a bit of work to configure a useful GUI environment because neither of the 2 main DEs are sufficiently speedy to work well on anything less than a P3-800 w 256MB of RAM.
Its actually quite sad that with all the work done by both the KDE and GNOME teams, their products are so inefficient, but I suppose thats what you get for blindly following Microsoft’s path into the land of bloat without realising that Microsoft actually get money from forcing people to upgrade their computers unecessarily while neither GNOME or KDE do.
Get your facts straight. Lindows (box) costs 59 USD. SuSE contains 1000x more for its price, that is *IF* you go with the box. In fact, you can install from FTP for free, so why spend 200 USD, if you have spare hardware already..? Lindows on the other can’t be had for free in any scenario.
“Of course, if something goes wrong with them (hardware), use it in your “garage sale” and buy another one.”
so you are selling dead HW in your garage sales; are you? … just pulling your leg, mate.
I’m curious to know how fast Suse 8.2 would run on a 8088 4.7/8MHZ; 512KB Mem; 20meg HDD; Hercules 720×360(?) Video Graphics C. (Green/Black); 15 years old machine.
KDE2 runs fine on my old Pentium 233MHz (but I haven’t used it for a while)
I still run my Amiga 4000 every day. It’s got the same processor as first delivered, a 68040 at 25 MHz, and with Commodore’s braindead memory system to boot. And I use it for everything. If you can’t run common productivity software on a 25 MHz machine, it’s only a testament to the incompetence of the programmers.
If you ask me, hardware development could just as well have been stalled once CPUs reach a hundred MHz. You don’t need any more than that, really. If you do, buy an SGI.
Im running Slack 9.0 on a 486. Runs great! Hopefully will make a decent print server soon.
Wish I had one…
> I’m curious to know how fast Suse 8.2 would run on a 8088 4.7/8MHZ; 512KB Mem; 20meg HDD; Hercules 720×360(?) Video Graphics C. (Green/Black); 15 years old machine.
Not sure, but Linux can run on that.
Actually, ELKS, Embeddable Linux Kernel System:
http://elks.sourceforge.net/
Enjoy
I installed SuSE 8.1 on a 200MHz. The installation took me a couple of days. The system runs pretty good now (as a server, no gui).
My old system is still in use.
I run Lycoris Linux (KDE 2.2.2) on a PII 233 / 384 MB Ram / as a w-lan clinet, Mail & Web Station and can view video Cd´s or lisen to my mp3 files as well.
Using Starofffice 6.0 it is still a perfect fall back device if our power horse get in truble.
I’ve been running SUSE 8.1 (with KDE 3.1) on an old Gateway Solo 233 for a couple of months now. In fact, SUSE was my third choice for this guy (after RH and Mandrake) and was the ONLY one that installed seamlessly. Actually, the sound system never worked, but then again I never put much effort into it as I use this box to crunch Folding packets (albeit slowly).
What’s wrong with running Linux on a Pentium 150? Nothing. In the early years (kernel 1.0,2.0) I ran it on nothing less than a pentium 200 and they still are running today. Granted in some cases if I put in RH9, mostly it’s in text mode but it still kicks. I also own an Aptiva K6-300 running RH 6.2 without any problems. Right now I’m in the middle of networking old computers to various versions of Linux to act as print servers, gateways and firewalls.
Not sure why linux advocates go so insane about linux actually working okay on a 150mhz system.
NT 4.0 and Office-97 will way outperform Linux and OpenOffice.
Sorry, no offense, I like Linux. But I like to keep it real.
Well, my system is a P3 500 Mhz and I have added a Geforce 2 Mx 64 Mg. I can say that it can run perfectly every thing that someone needs for daily use. It can even play quite well Unreal Tournament although not as well as I do in w2k. If you don’t do video editing , play the latest games then this system is suitable for everything like word editing, web development, video watching etc.
Why do I have to sell my system ?
Your all using fast machines. I still have an old version of slackware on a 486/66 with 12Mb memory and a 800 Mb hard drive and it works fine for simple needs. Try that with your NT 4.0 and Office 97.
Why would I want to go out and buy a new copy of NT 4.0 and office 97? It would be cheaper to buy a new computer.
Why would I trust a file or web server to an old and unsupported OS like NT4? It would be better to use a modern OS like Linux for which there are security fixes available, and which can be stripped down to the essentials.
This is not about theoretical ‘which is better’, it’s about making use those old boxes to do useful work. The whole point of using these old boxes is to save money. In that situation, Linux has no competition.
366 Mhz Celeron with 288mb of RAM with a 3 gig HD, its a Laptop with a Silicon Motion Lynx card with a Riptide Souynd card. It runs pretty well, wouldnt try to run Windows XP but SuSE runs fast enough and even with all the packages I want I still have 1178 mb of HD space left
{ Not sure why linux advocates go so insane about linux actually working okay on a 150mhz system.
NT 4.0 and Office-97 will way outperform Linux and OpenOffice.
Sorry, no offense, I like Linux. But I like to keep it real. }
Dude, What are you smoking ? I put NT4 on a 166 and man was it dog slow, and it had 128 mb of RAM to play with. Linux flies get used to it. I had a 386 that ran Windws NT 3.5 and I used that as a fileserver, until last year, I stripped off NT 3.5 and installed Red Hat 5.2 and it runs better than ever. Windows in any incarnation is a memory hog which makes it very slow, the only Windows OS that I see improvement in that area is Windows 2003 Server
>NT 4.0 and Office-97 will way outperform Linux
>and OpenOffice.
That certainly is debatible, but let’s assume that you’re correct. How much would it cost me to buy NT 4.0 and Office 97? Where would I get them? If there was a problem, then where would I get support? If a brand new worm is released that causes chaos in my system, then where do I get a patch? If I have to open a document in Word 2000 format, what can I do? If I want to serve some webpages, run a mail server, build a firewall, serve some usenet, provide SSH, and share an IP adress, then what can I do?
If it’s only to be used as an average “webstation” (emailing, web surfing, word processing, scheduler) I agree that Win NT 4 + Office 2000 feels a lor more responsive than any of the Linux Distros y ever tried on my P200 w/ 64 ram. Even faster than “small” distros like VectorLinux and Slackware.
Note that I am not talking about price or mission-critical tasks.
And in my experience I find hard to believe it if someone tells me that on such hardware a KDE 2x based distro runs/feels faster than Win NT4 or even W98. (I’m yet to try knoppix though)
No trolling meant
Of course, you cannot purchase NT 4.0 and Office 97 anymore, and they are not supported by MS. Not to mention the secuirty holes. Suse 8.2 is a current distro, so really shouldn’t you be installing Windows XP and Office XP? There’s no chance that those would run acceptably on that box.
I would rather run BEOS Personal Edition on p150 than linux. It’s free, it’s fast and the interface looks a whole lot better than Linux
But this is about putting old hardware to good use, so you could also put you old, paid for, software to good use on it as well.
If it is up to your needs, why trowing away your paid copy of NT4? only because you have a more capable system where bigger OSes can run better?
Bah.. I regularly deploy petros on older machines than that for doing dedicated tasks like mail server, radius and so forth. 486 with 16 Mb RAM, < 500 Meg drives runs fine and is quite snappy. I remember when a 486 was marketed as a powerful machine, and also remember running win 3.x on a 386SX with only 2meg of RAM. Come to think of it, I did a fair amount of work on 286s and humble 8088s too. If you ask me, you get a faster processor and the OS and applications just eat up those cycles and RAM for the fun of it.
P
I run SuSE 8.2 on a Athlon XP 2000+ with 768 DDR and Nvidia ti4200 128MB system and I don’t see any slow downs?
🙂
hehe
Don’t know if this has already been said but I’ve got a reminder for all you people.
Windows 95/98 run reasonably well on older hardware. P100’s, P200’s, etc. The graphics are fast and the programs are snappy. Too bad the stability sucks big time.
I really wish Linux had a _complete_ window manager/DE combo that ran this well on old hardware. Unfortunately every release of KDE/Gnome seem to be getting bigger and slower — and sure they’ve done a nice job and all — but there still isn’t a terribly useful DE for older computers.
And don’t give me crap about blackbox or fvwm those are rather limited to say the least.
Oh well.
I run a Windows 2000 on an old compaq with 128 MB of Sdram and it works perfectly well… Explorer loads in a couple of seconds and so does word 2000!
So, there is really NOTHING increadible about running Suse Linux on the same kind of hardware… and the load times are terrible with linux!
Well, you have a couple of choices.
XFCE+fvwm is good for old boxes, a little faster than win95 etc. It also iconises windows when you minimise them, something I really miss from blackbox/fluxbox.
I would say it’s pretty complete, as you can run all KDE apps in it anyway. What features do you find lacking?
Another option is to strip down KDE. You have to appreciate that even KDE is still quite modular. You can run ‘kicker’ (the task bar) with a very light WM for a minimal KDE environment.
I ran win98 and gentoo on the same box (p200 64mb) for a little while.
The speed issue of Win98 is not as straightforward as it appears. I find it’s fairly quick when running a single program, but rapidly bogs down once it hits swap, or you have a few progs open. It does the occasional thirty second pause while churning the disk and you can’t do anything else at the same time.
If you run gentoo with pre-empt+low latency with XFCE on the same box it’s much more useable. Apps generally take longer to start, but you don’t spend time waiting for the computer to let you use the mouse, and save more time by not loosing work/rebooting. I used a fast athlon computer to do all the compiling for installing programs by using distgcc.
It’s not really fair to compare a modern optimised distro like gentoo against win98 for speed and reliablility, and probably not trivial for the average user to set up, but the option is there if you need it.
Why do you need a P2 for a something simple like a dns/ftp/samba/whatever server. Take your old junk systems and use those. I run a 160g samba/ftp/nfs server on a old P90, a web/mysql server on a 486-66 w/ 64MB ram, and even a Shogo server on a 486 66 (shogo is an older game thats a mix of quake and transformers). All of these systems preform pretty well for my personal use and I usually don’t have any problems with speed. You can even use newer releases of linux. I currently have anywhere from SuSE 7.0 to 8.1 on my old machines. Just make sure you shut down processes that you won’t use on the server. I’ve seen so many people running X11 on a FTP server which is a complete waste. If the computer is going to be a server, cut out the programs you don’t need, don’t use inetd and manage through the console or remotely.
400 MHz is not slow. But I do agree that Windows 2000 is far snappier on my PIII-450 main machine than Linux. There is also a Pentium 166 here running Windows 2000 comfortably (with 128 MB RAM).
I recently acquired an NeXTstation. It run a full blown desktop OS (OpenStep 4.2) on a 25 MHz motorola ‘040 with 20 MB of RAM. And people are wondering of Linux running on Pentium 90. Come on people.
The two major Linux DE’s (GNOME and KDE) are extremely memory hungry. However, they don’t hit the processor very hard at all. I used to run KDE 2.x (which was slower than 3.x) on a P2-300. Recently, I reconfigured it to act as a Subversion server (replacing the old 486/33 that had been doing the job ’till now
. I loaded RedHat 9 and was surprised to see that GNOME 2.x was running so glacially. It turns out that I had taken the machine down from 256MB to 64MB, and in the process, swap usage had gone from 0MB to almost 100MB. So the minimum reasonable configuration for GNOME/KDE is about 256MB, maybe 192MB. However, once that minimum is in place, the system runs quite nicely, even on a relatively slow CPU.
When I was introduced to GNU/Linux for five years ago, I was mainly interested in it because of the ability to run a fullscale Unix-OS on old hardware.
Today, the big distributions like RH, SuSE and Mandrake offer an OS with full-blown graphics, windows and menus with antialiasing and all htat kind of bloated effects. In my honest opinion, these distributions are hit by the Windows-syndrome, since they tend to look and feel like Windows XP all the same. For newcomers and newbies, this might be a good idea, but I prefer my good old tcsh, mutt, vim, perl binaries and screen.
I don’t think it’s REALLY that fantastic, that SuSE GNU/Linux is able to run on this hardware. In this right moment, I have a server – a 166MHz Pentium with 64MB RAM and an old SCSI-drive running in the shelf – only equipped with FreeBSD. It runs proxy, ipfw, httpd, smbd, smtpd, pop3-daemon and some other nifty stuff – and still it is able to serve my divx-movies and mp3-files all over my network. That’s what I call nice reuse of old hardware!
So in my opinion, this article isn’t that fantastic, revolutionary or special at all.
—
Anders
FreeBSD – a REAL Unix for your x86: http://FreeBSD.org/
Agreed. Recompiled linux kernel 2.2 on a 486/133 MHz (AMD) with 32 MB RAM and 1 GB HD. The damn thing not only acts as an ssh and ftp server, it plays mp3 at around 44% CPU with no skipping, and I still have 430 MB free on the HD.
What? Of course its going to run on a Pentium. I’d run on a 286 with out any trouble i would imagine. Prolly make a good firewall/router.
Theres not much these system wont run on.
My main computer till 2 months ago was a 64M P2 233. It ran well enough to run windows, so its going to run just about any version of linux you could throw at it… There for, a far lesser system is also going to run linux.
I had the damnedest time trying to find a distribution that would run on my 200 MHz, 32 MB RAM, old Compaq laptop. I wanted to have a decent looking windowmanager, an html editor like Bluefish, a word processor compatible with Word. None of the SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake offerings gave me what I wanted (too slow, certain hardware not recognized), and Debian was a disaster for me. I tried Vector Linux, and with a little tweaking of config settings I got it working PERFECTLY. I felt so happy. And when the computer had Win 95 and later 98, it could never play MP3s well and was generally slow. Vector is able to play MP3s without any problems while I write documents on Abiword, using IceWM. Very nice! I suggest Vector 3.2 for any of you old hardware junkies, the Slackware base is great at using resources efficiently. Additionally, it looks sharp, using OS X widgets.
>>Of course, you cannot purchase NT 4.0 and Office 97 anymore,<<
You can purchase old copies of NT 4.0 and Office-97; on the web. ebay, half, amazon, and news groups. I bought an old NT 4.0 for $10 recently.
There are other advantages to Linux. But, if I have a five year old 200mhz system running NT 4.0 and Office-97; I would hardly see a compeling reason to switch over to Linux and OpenOffice.
I guess my real point was: what is so special a GUI/OS that runs okay on 150mzh/128mb system? MS was doing that 6 years ago. The old Apple GUI ran okay a 128k RAM system.
If you think this workd fine, then you could just run DOS on a 286. If all you are doing is word processing, that would be fine. Any version of Linux does little more than word processing and spreadsheets.
There are no good vector drawing or publishing programs for Linux. It’s true it is a good server, but I don’t need a server, or a database, or 3d modeling, nor a poorly documented development system.