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A Tale of Running Modern Linux on Hardware from 1997
- sbf501 4y ago> I have been interested in retro hardware for a long time. Retro. 1997. Cries in 8088.
- the_only_law 4y agoWait till you find out the debate about XP era machines being retro.
- zmgsabst 4y agoI thought the cutoff was 1 generation, or ~15 years. Everything before the iPhone is “retro”.
- badsectoracula 4y agoI 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).
- sponaugle 4y agoIt 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!
- hotpotamus 4y agoWinXP 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoI'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.
- badsectoracula 4y agoYes but what the users actually associate with the WinXP time period isn't the look&feel and UX of Win NT 3.1 nor the look&feel and UX of Win11, it is the very specific look& feel and UX of Windows XP which didn't really change much in later SPs. And yeah, sure, a machine running XP in 2014 (or later, people didn't stop using WinXP because Microsoft officially dropped support) isn't really retro, but the original argument was "WinXP era" machines which at least i'd put them into the early to midlate 2000s, when WinXP was the mainstream OS, before Vista started being used by the mainstream. PCs are very backwards compatible and unlike a ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, they are highly modular, so using edge cases (like WinXP being supported until 2014) isn't really that representative - by 2014 people had moved on to Win8.x and Win10 release was just some months away. Meanwhile almost every PC from 2003 or so, which originally would run only WinXP, can run Windows 8 - but aside from curiosity, nobody would really do that in practice. But still despite this vagueness, people do see those older PCs as retro. Even personally, despite growing up with XT clones, i cannot see the Athlon64 PC i bought in 2003 as anything else than a retro PC, even if it can run some modern indie games (at like 2 FPS :-).
- sponaugle 4y agoNo 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.
- selfhoster11 4y agoRecently I heard a Windows 7-era machine being called very old. I gained a grey hair or two just hearing this.
- bsedlm 4y agoI 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 4y agoUnfortunately, 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).
- TMWNN 4y agoVernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky depicts a human interstellar civilization thousands of years in the future, in which superluminal travel is impossible (for the humans), so travelers use hibernation to pass the decades while their ships travel between star systems. Merchants often revisit systems after a century or two, so see great changes in each visit. The merchants repeatedly find that once smart dust (tiny swarms of nanomachines) are developed, governments inevitably use them for ubiquitous surveillance, which inevitably causes societal collapse. <https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255 https://blog.regehr.org/archives/255>
- sbf501 4y agoInteresting. I'd like to read that. Similar to how the plot moves along in Rememberance of Earth's Past: everyone keeps hopping into hibernation to scoot along another 100 or so years.
- bee_rider 4y agoWould 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 4y agoIn 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 4y agoNow I want to cry too.
- sbf501 4y agoPerhaps 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 4y agoThe 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 4y agoI 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.
- __MatrixMan__ 4y agoOverheard the other day: > Tupac, a rapper from the 1900's
- pjmlp 4y agoIn 1997 I was using a Pentium 75, what were you doing with an 8088?!?
- squarefoot 4y agoI successfully run ELKS on a Flytech Carry 1 industrial computer. https://github.com/jbruchon/elks https://github.com/jbruchon/elks http://elks.sourceforge.net/ http://elks.sourceforge.net/ (old Sourceforge page) https://vinc.prv.pl/text/299e3ed5-320.html https://vinc.prv.pl/text/299e3ed5-320.html
- phendrenad2 4y agoAnything > 20 years old is retro. What modern PCs will be hot collector's items in 20 years?
- angrygoat 4y agoThe 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 4y agoMuch 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).
- rjsw 4y agoI can run NetBSD-current on a Macintosh Quadra 950 from 1992.
- sponaugle 4y agoIndeed, 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoHe 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 4y agoGrub2?! Use grub and it’ll work much better on old hardware
- marcus0x62 4y agoOr, to be period-correct, LILO or loadlin.exe to bootstrap Linux from MS-DOS.
- rob_c 4y ago> Use grub and it’ll work much better on old hardware what's your idea of old then?
- jaclaz 4y agogrub4dos would IMHO be even better, it is a derivative of grub with an endless list of added features.
- smm11 4y agoRetro. I don't just run such stuff at home, I still support mid-90s stuff 9-5.
- incanus77 4y agoI 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/ https://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/
- zozbot234 4y agoUnfortunately, 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 4y agoMy 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 https://github.com/EI2030/Low-power-E-Paper-OS
- incanus77 4y agoYeah, I found this out the hard way when "i386" distributions in fact supported 486+.
- badsectoracula 4y agoSlackware 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 https://bad-sector.itch.io/post-apocalyptic-petra [1] https://i.imgur.com/4X7lvZ7.png https://i.imgur.com/4X7lvZ7.png
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- causi 4y agoI 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.
- jeffbee 4y agoNobody would have had 256MB of RAM on a Pentium 100 in 1997.
- marcus0x62 4y agoIndeed. At that time I worked at a dialup ISP. Our modem bank (45 total lines) ran off of a 60mhz Pentium with 64MB of ram and, I believe, something like 2 GB of disk. We also had a screaming-fast 90mhz Pentium with 128mb of RAM and 4 GB of disk for our web server.
- pjmlp 4y agoIndeed, my P75 was using 32MB, if memory serves me right.
- initramfs 4y agoI 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/ https://pizza.slitaz.org/tiny/
- forinti 4y agoI think most consumer machines had 16MB. I bought a P166MMX in 1996 with 64MB. The motherboard would max out at 192MB.
- forinti 4y agoNice. 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.
- goosedragons 4y agoDoes NDISwrapper still exist/work? I used to use that back in the day to use my WiFi adapter on Linux using the Windows driver.
- the_only_law 4y agoIt exists, not sure about works. I wonder how out of date it is. I haven’t heard of anyone using it in recent times, and I imagine the NDIS version used by the driver is somewhat old. It’s been quite a while since I had the honor of dealing with the wonderful NDIS docs, so I’m not sure how much of issue that would be
- dTal 4y agoIt'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.
- bacchusracine 4y agoI really wish there were more devices like the Zipit Z2. I missed out when it was in its heyday and I really wish I could have jumped onboard. There seems to be a real dearth of cheap easily hacked hardware for Linux that can be turned into hacker toys and used to show off with these days.
- dTal 4y agoWell, for what it's worth, I now fill that same niche of "pocket daily driver" with a GPD Micro PC, which is a wildly more functional machine in every respect. It doesn't need to be "hacked" to put Linux on it - it's a perfectly ordinary x86 laptop - but it still gets coos of interest from strangers.