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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
by angrygoat 4y ago
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'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).