merci3Just wanted to show off the lowest end hardware I ever ran Linux on
Diabolo962 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.
I think my lowest was a 33 MHz 486sx (maybe DX) with 8MB of RAM.
I wouldn’t want to try it today though.
addieYeah, 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’m gonna try installing on a 1066MHz core2 duo wish me luck
That is 64 bit. Literally any modern distro should run on it.
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]
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 😆
I remember when 128MB RAM sticks were $400
whalerossI 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EugeniaAre 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.
Lettuce eat lettuceHell 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 ✊
LoudWaterHombreI run a rpi zero w first gen
DaveI 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!
data1701d (He/Him)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.
Ran an ISP on a Pentium 90 and a few 486s. Linux and FreeBSD!
brazil mentioned! does itautec still makes pc’s?
MPV is a much lighter video player. Try that.
Arthur BesseI’m planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century
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!
Count Regal Inkwellitautec
reproduto(…)
points Brazilian