A Tale of Running Modern Linux on Hardware from 1997

Slackware might have worked too. I haven&#x27;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 &quot;prof&quot; didn&#x27;t work since it required some functionality introduced in later CPUs, so i couldn&#x27;t do the profiling).<p>I do remember that i had to replace a file in the ISO for it to boot (it was a mistake on Slackware&#x27;s side and there was a patch for it in the forums) but i think this was patched in &quot;current&quot; so Slackware 15 should not need it.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bad-sector.itch.io&#x2F;post-apocalyptic-petra" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bad-sector.itch.io&#x2F;post-apocalyptic-petra</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;4X7lvZ7.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;4X7lvZ7.png</a>

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&#x27;t need to download packages over my 56k modem.<p>Strange to read in this blog post that contemporary Linux distros wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t that much less than now: or maybe that&#x27;s just nostalgia speaking?

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!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;distro.ibiblio.org&#x2F;baslinux&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;distro.ibiblio.org&#x2F;baslinux&#x2F;</a>

It&#x27;s not quite &quot;retro&quot; 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&#x27;d even compile software, provided it was written in C and not C++. This was around 2010.<p>I doubt you&#x27;d get any &quot;mainstream&quot; distros to run on it now, much less Debian. The bloat is real.

Nice. I recently tried a few small distros on a P166MMX with 80MB of RAM.<p>The best one turned out to be DSL.<p>Unfortunately, I could only get wifi using Win2K because of the driver and then IE can&#x27;t handle current SSL protocols and most sites don&#x27;t work.<p>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&#x27;ve become used to having a lot of software very easily available, so retro hardware seems a bit dull.

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.

I can run NetBSD-current on a Macintosh Quadra 950 from 1992.

&gt; I have been interested in retro hardware for a long time.<p>Retro.<p>1997.<p>Cries in 8088.

Nobody would have had 256MB of RAM on a Pentium 100 in 1997.

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.

Grub2?!<p>Use grub and it’ll work much better on old hardware

Retro. I don&#x27;t just run such stuff at home, I still support mid-90s stuff 9-5.