8 Jun
2013
8 Jun
'13
7:23 a.m.
--- On Sat, 6/8/13, Tothwolf <tothwolf at concentric.net> wrote:
A current Debian distribution such as 6.0 (squeeze) or
7.0
(wheezy) should work on a 486, at least in console mode
(I've not even considered trying to run current X11 on one)
but you'll need as much memory as you can install plus lots
of hard drive and a swap partition. Installation would also
likely be very slow, and you'd want to deselect everything
in 'tasksel' during installation (unless you have at least
2GB of hard drive space, but even then it will install a lot
of useless stuff) and manually install whatever packages you
need after letting it install the base OS.
Isn't that how everyone installs Debian? Just run the installer for base, and install
manually what you want, when you want it? Tasksel is pretty broken and installs all kinds
of useless junk.
I'm running a recent version of Debian (5.0) on a 486/66 with 32 megs of RAM. It runs
great, and it's one of the most stable, constantly on boxes I have. It's mostly
just a utility box, but it does it's job well. Of course, no X, but it's not like
I need X not like I'm going to try to run a browser on a 486, and that's about all
you need X for. I compiled a custom kernel for this machine to trim down the memory
footprint, I'm running 2.6.37, with just what I need added. The root filesystem is a 1
gig partition on a 1.2 gig drive - the rest of which is used for swap. I think I'm
only using 400 megs.
Linux runs fine on older hardware. Sure, it's a bit sluggish - ssh, for instance, is
pretty processor intensive, and is slow to initiate on a machine this old. This is to be
expected. Compiles are also very slow - building the kernel took well over a day. But, by
and large, most stuff runs OK, and the system is very usable. Definitely would not want to
run X, however...
-Ian