Just wanted to show off the lowest end hardware I ever ran Linux on
from merci3@lemmy.world to linux@lemmy.ml on 15 Jun 14:50
https://lemmy.world/post/31425060
from merci3@lemmy.world to linux@lemmy.ml on 15 Jun 14:50
https://lemmy.world/post/31425060
Single core, 32 bit CPU, can’t even do video playback on VLC. But it kinda works for some offline work, like text editing, and even emulation through zsnes! It’s crazy how Linux keeps old hardware like this running.
Thankfully though, this laptop CPU is upgradable, and so is the ram, so I’m planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century 😄
threaded - newest
2 gigs of ram ? You probably can have an emulation station up to PS1 with this hardware.
Oh, I tried… But the CPU/GPU is just TOO slow for that, SNES was the best I could do
I always forget how crappy Intel iGPUs are.
So, not a
Potato ?
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/3280041d-6dfe-4f4d-8ba5-9a2c44c8f892.jpeg">
Pretty close tho
Whilst the Celeron was indeed utter cack, 2 GB has me making four Yorkshiremen-style "2GB? Luxury!" style comments.
I used to run Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire 1362 WMLi back in 2005. I had 512 MB of RAM and a 2800+ Sempron processor.
That said, looking at this:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1351vs710/Mobile-AMD-Sempron-2800+-vs-Intel-Celeron-M-1.60GHz
My old Sempron was a better CPU than that piece of junk Celeron you've got there. Giving it 2GB of RAM is hilarious!
Ikr? Makes me wonder what that celeron was meant for? It barely ran the Win 7 that came preinstalled. That’s why I’m so happy to see it run modern Debian with modern packages. Also why I’m doing some research on CPUs to upgrade it to
I assume it was made to upsell people to better CPUs. Celerons have always been awful.
That said, if Win7 came preinstalled then we're talking about different eras of Celeron, at least, I cannot imagine it would be as mediocre as a low-mid AMD CPU from 2004!
I always think of an ex of mine defending criticism of her craptop. "It was good for its time!" No, no it wasn't. It was built around a Celeron. It was built to be trash. It was ewaste with extra steps.
i started using linux on a single core pentium 4 with 384M of ram
Man, does 384 sound weird!
I know it was a 256 MB and a 128 MB stick… but it was a long time ago…
I was 14 years old, and I got the 128meg stick for free. Beggars can’t be choosers haha
I think my lowest was a 33 MHz 486sx (maybe DX) with 8MB of RAM.
I wouldn’t want to try it today though.
I was running my Gateway 2000 486 sx33 with Linux did she extended amount of time as a router with NAT. I’ve still got it somewhere in the loft.
Complete with cow-print box?
The first machine I ran Linux on was a 486DX 33MHz too. I think it had 8 MB (or some weird thing like 4 MB originally and randomly stuck 8 MB addition? I don't remember anymore.)
I had the exact same configuration. 4MB RAM upgraded to 8MB. 40MB HDD upgraded to 200MB later. And the fugliest case with triangular pastel buttons you ever saw. Ran Windows 3.11 then Slackware Linux on that for many years.
Who used those triangular pastel buttons? I remember seeing them on some friends’ computers but not on any Dells or Gateway 2000 machines. Maybe Compaq? Or Packard Bell?
I have not been able to find the case again since. It was a local shop that built it from parts, so it was not a big brand. I didn’t pick the parts either, since I knew nothing about PCs at the time, and it showed lol.
Edit: it was a white/beige mini tower. If I recall correctly, it was similar to a lot of cases at the time, with a black band across and a circular button on the right. The turbo and reset buttons were pink and teal in the shape of triangles. I purchased it in 1992 when I needed a PC for college.
I started on a DX2 66 MHz with 4 MB RAM and 420 MB HDD. 4 x 1 MB modules. Later upgraded to 20 MB RAM (added 4 x 4 modules) and a 1.2 GB Matrox HDD that need an extra driver to be used. With 20 MB I created a RAM drive, copied Doom to it and ran it - loaded real fast but frame rate was horrible.
That’s awesome. My 1993 self is very envious of your rig.
Yeah, mine was similar. Had some old Win95 machines from work that were getting thrown away; scavenged as much RAM as possible into one case and left Red Hat Linux downloading overnight on the company modem. Needed two boxes of floppy disks for the installer, and I joined up a 60 MB and an 80MB hard drive using LVM to create the installation drive. It was a surprisingly functional machine - much better at networking than it was as a Win95 computer - but yeah, those days are long gone.
I saw Slackware running on a similar config, although it was probably a 486/50 or 486/66.
You one-upper, you.
My first was a rare CPU, but not that old. It was my first PC and was fanless, which I used to think was normal until years later. It was a VIA Cyrix III, maybe 32 MB RAM. Another interesting thing about this CPU was its overclock capabilities. I don’t know how it did survive my overclocking, since I genuinely didn’t have a clue, except that if I raised the numbers, KDE could run, but if I didn’t, well, Xfce was also cool.
Mone might even had been a Cyrix too. Honestly I struggle to remember. My dad bought straight Intels and I bought the clones (cheaper) I can’t remember which one I first started on, but both got it eventually.
Yeah, this is the way.
I’m gonna try installing on a 1066MHz core2 duo wish me luck
Good luck trying to run neofetch😭🙏
That is 64 bit. Literally any modern distro should run on it.
It was 32 bit but turned out to be a 2.1GHz so it’s running Debian with lxqt now and going great 👍
Celeron M with 2GB ram? That’s actually not low at all :p
I bet it runs NetBSD or Tinycore flawlessly
It ain’t high enough to do playback on VLC tho :p but can do some nice fun with it
maybe try mplayer/xine/mpv?
I’ll keep these in mind, hope debian still got 32 bit version of these packages.
Debian will not run on Pentium anymore. It is not performance, it is compiler options. You need a i686 (Pentium Pro). This means none of the Debian derivatives will either.
Adelie, Arch32, and T2 all still run on Pentium though I believe.
[edit: sorry, I saw Pentium 75 from the comment above - Celeron M should be fine]
With no real GPU you’re gonna be limited to like DVD playback at best.
And Xfce4 doing the
lightheavy lifting as usual.arstechnica.com/…/linux-to-end-support-for-1989s-…
Considering they just dropped i486 support this year I’d say you’re running this on a super computer by comparison
Ran Ubuntu 8 with Compiz and integrated graphics on a Pentium 4 with 512MB RAM. It was an awful machine, but Linux made it great to use. I still miss the peak of GTK2 + Emerald.
Mmmmm compiz. Wobbly windows, spinny cube virtual desktops, take me home!
KDE still has most of these features!
That’s strange, what distro are you running on this hardware? VLC has been around for a long time, so while older hardware might not support versions of it that support newer codecs, I’d imagine it should be able to do at least some video playbook on older versions of VLC.
see image. distro is debian
Oh, duh. Lol, thanks.
I suspect my first Linux ran on an 80mhz AMD K6. I did however also run it on a retired dual core UltraSPARC some years later I had somehow gotten my hands on. It might have been faster, but at that time it sure felt slow. And it sounded like a train passing through when it was on. In retrospect installing Gentoo on it was an optimistic endeavour.
Ackshually… I also had an AMD K5 with Performance Rating 100.
K6 was 166 MHz and up, Pentium II competitor.
2GB of RAM? Low?
Were you born after the year 2000?
Haha, I’ve been used to 4gb ram minimum for most of my life 😆
Get off my lawn
I remember when 128MB RAM sticks were $400
I remember expanding my Amiga with 512KB to 1MB Fast RAM and later going crazy with another two megabyte Slow RAM.
I remember my dad’s friend upgrading our PC clone to 640K. He used a soldering iron.
I remember when computers had no memory and the storage was on punch cards made from mammoth leather that we had to tan ourselves after spending our weekends hunting the mammoth with spears. Also we carved our code by hand on stone tablets. Young people these days have it easy.
You had one job.
Mentioning punch cards had me, but you blew it!
Punch cards. The “true” PC era.
.
.
“Stone” tablets? Luxury. Ours were dried mammoth dung.
I slept in my first computer - and worked as verbal RAM (first VRAM!) 28 hours a day !
“…and when you tell this to young people today, they won’t believe you !” - Monty Python.
Oh so that’s where the term VRAM comes from! 🤯
I still have a cool laptop (with Mandrake and kde) with 192 megs of memory somewhere.
Lmao, I’ve ran Linux on an eeePC with 1GB RAM and 900MHz Intel Atom. Compiling gcc & glibc could take hours.
Edit: RPi3 still got only 1GB, BeagleBone Black even got 512MB, don’t forget RPi0
That uptime though.
My 2011 MacBook pro is still chugging along thanks to Linux.
I upgraded 4GB RAM to 16GB, upgraded the HDD to SSD, and replaced the CD drive with a second SSD. Sadly the screen is almost completely gone, occasionally intermittent, probably a cable gone bad, not sure, but the mini display port is working fine for an external monitor.
Did the same thing with my Thinkpad, 1 tb SSD, 20gb ram (16 gig stick and 4 soldered on) and an upgrade wifi card. Best computer I’ve ever had
My girlfriend’s 2012 MacBook Pro is also running Fedora like a beast with its upgraded 16GB or Ram and its SSD.
It’s great that old hardware gets a bew chance to shine!
I found my people.
I have Linux on a 2009 and 2012 MacBook Pro and 2013 and 2017 MacBook Airs.
The 2009 is getting a bit sluggish but for regular stuff, they all work great. We even played a Steam game on the 2012 earlier today (not AAA obviously).
All Chimera Linux.
2012 MBP here, 12Gb RAM & 500Gb SSD, running Solus Budgie.
My daily driver at home has the same specs. Works fine.
Do you daily drive htop or something? 😆
No just top. Only with swap on…😉
I’ve run Linux on a 166MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM. There’s not much modern software that will run on that hardware though.
I have been operating a DNS-232 NAS with 32 MB RAM and ARM CPU with lighty webserver for a while. It could run MoinMoinWiki, written in Python 2, acceptably. Slowest thing I have tried to work on was a 386. But this one was slow - compiling the kernel took an eternity.
You would be surprised. If you stay text only and use a 32 bit distro, it would run up to date versions of most CLI programs.
Adelie and Arch32 still support Pentium.
Booting to a GUI, there are still a few options. I think Velox would run on that. I bet Xorg with FVWM would too. You are not going to have much left for apps though. However, you could run a couple of terminals.
Adelie Linux (totally modern Linux distro) lists 64 MB as the minimum server memory requirement.
I ran Damn Small Linux on it about 15 years ago. That worked pretty well and it would even run a web browser. It would probably boot Tiny Core Linux, but there wouldn’t be much RAM left to run any programs. The motherboard supports 128MB, but it’s not really worth the cost to upgrade it though.
I may see about resurrecting that computer. I’ve got an old Motorola police radio that I would like to reprogram to operate in the 2M ham band and I think that PC will run the programming software.
Thanks, I feel a lot better about my potato-grade laptop now 😁
I rushed to the comments when I saw a 1.6ghz CPU being called low end but I see OPs already been dealt with. I remember the first ever 1ghz CPU being an overclocked nitrogen cooled AMD Athlon. Me and my mates were all talking about it when it happened.
But why would a 1.6 ghz, single core CPU not be low end in 2025? Perfomance itself is very sluggish, and it has only been able to do very simple offline tasks for now. Yeah, yeah, many people used to run 512mb ram and 500mhz cpu setups… But that was in 2000 and whatever.
The post title says “ever” rather than “2025”. It’s cool for 2025 and we may get some interesting others, but many here will have ran it on something slower at some point.
Yes, the title say lowest I ever ran That was the lowest for me, I really don’t get the confusion. And even then, a celeron m 380 was lower end even for it’s own time
But why would a 1.6 ghz, single core CPU not be low end in 2025? Perfomance itself is very sluggish, and it has only been able to do very simple offline tasks for now. Yeah, yeah, many people used to run 512mb ram and 500mhz cpu setups… But that was in 2000 and whatever.
If Minix counts, I got it running on a 286 some years ago. I don’t remember how much RAM it had, but it was very little.
Huehuehue Br
Are you using systemd? Because 317 MB of RAM is really low for a normal Debian installation with XFce. At my mom’s 2 GB ram laptop, it uses 850 MB on a cold boot.
It is because it is 32 bit. You can run a 32 bit distro on your machine too if you really want.
You can get a full Trinity desktop on Q4OS in 130 MB of RAM (32 bit edition).
I don’t think the difference between 32bit and 64bit is 2x in memory sizes, it’s way less than that. I run Q4OS, it runs at 350 MBs here.
Are you running Trinity or KDE?
Not sure why I get so much less unless it is that. Or are you saying you run Trinity 64 bit?
I agree that 32 bit is not often going to be 50% less in practice. Sometimes I think we should be running 64 bit kernels with 32 bit userland.
Trinity of course. That’s the point of low end computing with Q4OS. :)
850 sounds crazy. maybe you forgot to subtract cached memory?
I’m telling you what htop reports.
I think the weakest computer I’ve had Linux on was an original Xbox running DSL.
Are we competing again?
I’m proud to be setting up a rhel10 desktop, as it’ll be the first time I ran Linux as a desktop in 30 years of a Linux/Unix career.
To rephrase: I ran XFree86 on a 4mb i386 machine 30 years ago.
What do I win?
I didnt have the intention to compete, was just proud of seeing this 2007 laptop running a modern OS again!
It’s not that bad. I run Linux on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which is much weaker than this. (It’s not a competition, though. Just saying.) And that’s also a pretty standard device. I’m kinda interested to see if anyone can go below 64M RAM with a modern installation.
amazing, well done! i run Debian on cheap used Thinkcentre PCs, run as k3s worker nodes just fine.
May I ask what are the specs and size of those Thinkcentres? I have one I’m using as a server and planning to upgrade the CPU because it has a dual core one, and someone offered me the same one I have, but it’s pretty big. I’d prefer to use the tiny models when I can buy some :D
Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q, Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p
separate cheap newer N100 cpu node for jellyfin, other encoding
Intel NUC NUC8i5BEHS for k3s control plane, little more expensive but reliable.
i usually replace Thinkcentre fans w noctua for power draw, performance, and noise. and remove wifi module, not needed, draws power, closed blob firmware, is a risk. pops out easy, no config changes needed in Debian.
Thank you! That’s really helpful for the plans I have :)
I also daily drive LMDE on a… Considerably old inspiron, but not even close to being as old as the one in my post tho 😄
I’ve got an Acer Aspire from 2008 running mint on an Intel Atom and 1 GB memory (might be 2, I forget). It is slow but very usable except for video and such.
Hell yeah! Love seeing old hardware like this still running a modern OS.
With Linux, if your hardware is a decade old, you’ve barely even reached middle-age.
Meanwhile Windows 11 won’t even allow an official install on hardware that’s 4-5 years old.
Long live Linux & FOSS ✊
I run a rpi zero w first gen
I ran it on an original Raspberry Pi B which has the same RAM and a slower CPU than the original Zero! It was still in use as a Pi-hole (running the DietPi OS) until recently where it seems to be dying or not keeping up.
Thanks for suggesting DietPi! I never heard of it but it sounds just like what my ZeroW needs
(Also runs PiHole)
No problem! I’ve used it for years, though my home assistant running on a Raspberry Pi 4 is now doing the pi-hole thing with adguard instead as the original one was having issues. Though you get weird DNS quirks when the machine running DNS also relies on the internet.
Plus that time I did a dumb thing in home assistant to see what would happen, and it brought the internet down.
So I am keen to get another Pi. I highly recommend keeping it on a dedicated device you never touch except for updates!
Those are better specs than what I used throughout college (an Asus Eee PC running Debian with Xfce and Openbox). Not a powerful machine, but I absolutely loved that thing.
thats my current laptop
Edit: im exagerating but I really have 20-yr 32-bit Dell laptops running minimal debian linux. and my current laptop is 10+ yrs old Lenovo which I already replaced its screen, rams, keyboard, bluetooth, usb ports… and it’s still working flawlessly for daily tasks, video/music editing, coding and programming, internet browsing :D
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6b0b29ea-fdb6-422e-b09e-a7a0518de1fb.gif">
Is this one of those old obscenely small obscenely underpowered net books?
This one is actually obscenely underpowered but obscenely large laptop
I got you beat with my HP Mini running a 32-bit Intel Atom N270 that I use to develop games for the open source physiotherapy gamification device I made for my kid when I’m on the train.
Don’t want to carry my full-size gaming laptop to work just to do some light lua coding.
I booted Buildroot with kernel 5.17 on a Pentium II laptop off a CD I burned once - I needed to dump a drive once and that was the only hardware I had on hand that could dump 2.5” IDE drives and had a working CD drive so I could boot something other than the operating system installed on the drive.
I’m pretty certain the first computer I installed Linux on was a Pentium 75 with 4MB of RAM. I know I ran it on some 486s booting off floppys at work. We were at 10,000 feet and couldn’t trust the lifespan of spinning rust.
shop.hak5.org/products/shark-jack technically runs openwrt.
Nice
Yes the laptop CPU and RAM may be upgradeable but have you considered the parts availability? Considering its a 32bit CPU
Yeah, that’s what I’m researching right now… I hope I can at least make it useable enough for web browsing
Up 'til 2022 or 2023 company I work for used Pentium 4 at POS PCs running ancient openSUSE. They would be still in service if it weren’t for leaking/swollen caps on most motherboards. Pure power wasn’t really there, but it was plenty enough to run that checkout software…
I had slackware on my 386DX 40. 4mb ram. It was kinda short-lived. I never got my modem working. I got a book, paged thought it. Learning shit was hard in the 90’s Internet.
Similar story but I just installed slackware on one of the University PCs (they just had a handful of PCs in the general computer room for the students and nobody actually watched over us) since I did not have a PC yet (only had a ZX Spectrum at the timback then).
Trying to get X-Windows to work in Slackware was interesting, to say the least: back then you had to manually create your own video timings configuration file to get the graphics to work - which means defining the video mode at the very low level, such as configuring the number of video clock cycles between end-of-line-drawing and horizontal-retrace - and fortunatelly I didn’t actually blow up any monitor (which was possible if you did the configuration wrong).
At least we had some access to the Internet (most things were blocked but we had Usenet and e-email and one could use FTPmail gateways to download stuff from remote servers) via Ethernet, so that part was easy.
Anyways, my first reaction looking at the OP’s post was like: yeah, if they’re running X it’s probably a too powerfull machine.
My favorite part of the first configuration of x back then, you screw with the conf for ages, manage to get a viable video mode set, startx for the billionth time… gray screen, mouse cursor… Overflowingly happy… Wait, now what? No program manager, no apps, no terminal, No exit, no shutdown. What’s a window manager? The least apparent thing in the world being to switch consoles , export a display variable, and start an xtern in the video console.
We worked so hard for every little thing.
Yeah, but at least we knew how to switch consoles.
I bet that most Linux users nowadays don’t event know the CTRL+ALT+Fx shortcuts to switch console.
Can’t say that the old days were really “good” compared to what we had now, but there was definitelly a lot of satisfaction in step by step getting the system to work.
Oh God no, You’re 100% correct on all that. We were living through endorphins and we now have something in between nostalgia and Stockholm syndrome for the old days.
I got my modem working in Slackware in 1997 - but the PPP driver (equivalent of WinSock - which worked in Windows quite well at the time) would only work during the first boot of the system. After a reboot, PPP would never return, and the best I got out of the internet about it at the time (mostly using my Windows PC) was “real men connect to the internet through ethernet.”
Between that an the useless (unless you enjoy frustration) sound drivers, I declared Linux “not ready for prime time,” and left it to others until starting back in via Cygwin in 2003, then Gentoo (for 64 bit access you couldn’t get any other way) in 2005.
Yeah I did another couple of false starts over the next couple of years. This time at different jobs. I finally made friends with Redhat on a laptop with Enlightenment WM. I managed to stay Linux in the desktop for the next 14 years. KDE, Gnome , switch to Ubuntu when Red hat decided to go and split out the door, went back to Fedora when Cannocial had their bad boy phase. OSX lured me away and 2015 I think it was. Super disappointed with the level of control I had over the OS, I went back to Windows for WSL. Continued* on that until Debian got their shit back together (nonfree). Eventually slid into NixOS, I don’t know if it’s as painful as slack where I was but it certainly feels like it, and I kind of missed that.
I did OS-X for my MacBookPro daily driver 2006-2008 (said premium laptop dying because of mis-applied thermal paste by the factory) - and started using a bit of Debian and RedHat at the time… my observation was, and still is: they all suck, but in different ways. If you value stability and control, there’s no comparison to the open source model. Windows used to have the edge for hardware support, but that has eroded to the point that we had selected a WiFi card for our Linux system this year, but we’re having to change now that we’re moving to Win11 - no Windows drivers for that M.2 WiFi/BT card.
Older machines running Xfce brings me joy.
Xfce on Debian is my preferred flavor these days - regardless of machine power.
Stories from the “good” old days running Linux on a 386 machine with 4 MB or less of memory aside, in the present day it’s still perfectly normal to run Linux on a much weaker machine as a server - you can just rent a the cheapest VPS you can find (which nowadays will have 128 MB, maybe 256MB, and definitelly only give you a single core) and install it there.
Of course, it won’t be something with X-Windows or Wayland, much less stuff like LibreOffice.
I think the server distribution of Ubunto might fit such a VPS, though there are server-specific Linux distros that will for sure fit and if everything fails TinyCore Linux will fit in a potato.
I current have a server like that using AlmaLinux on a VPS with less than 1GB in memory, which is used only as a Git repository and that machine is overkill for it (it’s the lowest end VPS with enough storage space for a Git repository big enough for the projects I’m working on, so judging by the server management interface and linux meminfo, that machine’s CPU power and memory are in practice far more than needed).
If you’re willing to live with a command line interface, you can run Linux on $50 worth of hardware.
And boy would that core be shitty and over-provisioned.
Ubuntu 12 on an Intel atom 270m with an nvidia chip set with 125mb ram lol
Those Tualatin core CPUs were absolutely fantastic. They doubled them and made the Core2. I had one running for 10+ years. I don’t know what it was about the bios but it was the fastest boot PC I ever built.
Ran an ISP on a Pentium 90 and a few 486s. Linux and FreeBSD!
Pfft, what no LXDE
even better LXQT
the theme tricked me into thinking this is Cinnamon
I got the icons and themes directly from a Mint install on another machine (cause I couldnt find these online) 😁
I am pretty sure it’s in mint-artwork package
Is it avaiable on debian repos?
There is a deb
I have a 2001 compaq n600 still being used from time to time as a gateway for old tech as it has COM as well as LPT and analog video outs. It has 1.2ghz celeron, 512mb ram, 30 gig drive. Thing is kind of a beast for its time as my own desktop at that time was nowhere close to its spects. Thing was gifted to me after initially being given to install win7 on it. After telling the guy that this isnt going to happen and the best they couldd hope for is winxp and even then it’d struggle, they told me “oh, so linux is the only option then… well, it doesnt work for me. Have it, then, have fun with it!”. I put ubuntu on it, but still gnome ground the poor cpu to a halt, so I had to switch to Xfce. Luckily it turned good enough not to downgrade further to things like bare X or Kolibri OS. Worked as a solitaire machine for my dad for a few years, helped me fix and set up stuff on a few occasions, but nowadays mostly collecting dust in my drawer.
brazil mentioned! does itautec still makes pc’s?
Not sure, but this one is a 2007 piece of art
[ laughs in NetBSD ]
I remember back in the day when I downloaded the first divx file my K6-400 couldn’t smoothly play… I had been so used to thinking of that as a powerhouse coming from my Pentium 60, which was the first one I ran Linux on.
ITT: The Four Yorkshiremen Sketch.
MPV is a much lighter video player. Try that.
I think it was born in the 21st century? From this it looks like the first Celeron M was in 2004, and the first at that clockspeed was 2005.
Also, 2GB of RAM is plenty for many purposes - that’s more than any Raspberry Pi before the Pi 4 had!
Actually… You’re right about the 21st century lmao. I just wanted an excuse to quote Metal Gear Solid
Also, the issue is not ram itself, of course, 2GB is enough for lots of fun on Linux, it’s the CPU that’s killing me
Pretty sure my dad’s secondary desktop I used for my first Linux install had a 1.2 GHz Duron or something and 512 MB. I’m pretty sure I got that funky compiz fusion 3D-cube desktop running on there 😅
points Brazilian