Programmer's distro for old machine

turboscrew · 06-27-2014, 05:48 PM

Any distro suggestions for programmer's secondary machine?

The machine is old Thinkpad T42 (Pentium M).

I was about to put Mint 17 MATE in it, but started wondering if it's too heavy. Any experiences anyone?
(Yes, it supports PAE, but not the flag, so 'forcepae' works.)

It's a laptop, not phone, so Ubuntu (unity) is not an option.

Next Debian looks good, but too far away (I would like to try LiveCD).

I often use SW like eclipse, ddd/nemiver, virtual machines (no HW acceleration support) and the like. Sometimes COOCOX JTAG-debugger.

It's decade since I last used "rpm-world" distros, but they do as well. I just don't know much about those distros - which are small, which are huge and so on.

What I DON'T (usually) do: Gaming or multimedia (or entertainment in general).

astrogeek · 06-27-2014, 06:12 PM

I recommend (and use) Slackware on a lot of older hardware.

I use VirtualBox for vm's and as long as your machine has a full boat of RAM and good disk space, it should do fine.

I think the Pentium M's were all above 1GHz and were the predecessor of the centrino. I am typing from a centrino circa 2005, 1.7Ghz Toshiba Laptop which is my main work machine and runs Slackware current (14.1) with no problems at all.

If you are a programmer then you should not have any difficulties setting it up just as you want (that does NOT imply that you have to be a programmer to run Slackware!).

Slackware comes with Fluxbox (my choice) and Xfce, which are both lightweight graphical environments that should do fine on that machine.

Slackware is my perfect distro and this old machine is my perfect platform - I hope they both outlive me because I do not want to change!

TobiSGD · 06-27-2014, 06:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by astrogeek

I think the Pentium M's were all above 1GHz and were the predecessor of the centrino. I am typing from a centrino circa 2005, 1.7Ghz Toshiba Laptop which is my main work machine and runs Slackware current (14.1) with no problems at all.

Centrino was the name of the platform (CPU+chipset+WLAN chip), while the Pentium M was the first CPU used for that platform. Later on Centrino only described Intel's WLAN and WiMax chips. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino

On the original question, any distro can be used for programming, so I would recommend to choose the distribution using other points of interest: which package manager do you prefer, do you want a stable system or bleeding edge, ... .

astrogeek · 06-27-2014, 06:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD

Centrino was the name of the platform (CPU+chipset+WLAN chip), while the Pentium M was the first CPU used for that platform. Later on Centrino only described Intel's WLAN and WiMax chips. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino

Thanks. I wrote that from (increasingly clouded) memory - should have looked!

For comparison by OP, this machine has:

Code:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

...
model name      : Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1.73GHz
stepping        : 8
cpu MHz         : 1729.030
...

...with 2GB RAM and I recently installed new 1TB HD.

Otherwise pretty vanilla with Intel graphics and wireless.

As I said, it runs the current Slackware with no sweat, Google Earth, VirtualBox, lots of developemnt activity, local Httpd server with ~40 Vhosts, MariaDB, PostgreSQL... 12-16 hours busy uptime per day.

The real beauty of Slackware is how easy it is to manage your own versions of selected applications without being tightly constrained by a package manager. You can get build scripts for most things you need from SBo if they are not included already.

saivinoba · 06-27-2014, 07:22 PM

I've a T42 with 2GB RAM. I'm running Gentoo on it with MATE desktop. Occassionally Firefox and such load tad slow. But otherwise no issues. Gentoo would be my suggestion. If you don't like compile-everything approach, there is always Slackware.

turboscrew · 06-27-2014, 07:23 PM

How do you handle dependencies between packages in Slackware?
(It uses just tgz:s?)
What I'm afraid of is that I have to use 6 days of a week for installing the tools, and
have only one day left for the actual task.

Any idea, btw, about the forms of parameters of the VirtualBox debugger commands?
And using symbols? I've tried to find some kind of manual for VirtualBox debugger, but haven't found.

astrogeek · 06-27-2014, 07:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by turboscrew

How do you handle dependencies between packages in Slackware?
(It uses just tgz:s?)
What I'm afraid of is that I have to use 6 days of a week for installing the tools, and
have only one day left for the actual task.

Any idea, btw, about the forms of parameters of the VirtualBox debugger commands?
And using symbols? I've tried to find some kind of manual for VirtualBox debugger, but haven't found.

Slackware's package tools do not manage dependencies for you - I consider that to be a feature, not deficiency!

If you do a full install of the Slackware base system then there will not be many dependency issues for add-ons. Then, if you build your extra packages from SBo scripts, they will list the dependencies for each one making it easy to build and manage.

I manage all my own packages this way, including a few for which SBo scripts were not available and have never experienced dependency hell! RPM was MUCH worse! It is in my own opinion, the most superior way to manage your systems packages.

There is also now an sbopkg application which will handle dependencies for you, but I have not used it. I am sure someone will jump in here with some advice on using it.

I have no experience with VirtualBox debugger.

EDIT...

I forgot to add a link in case you are not familiar with SBo.

Also, I second what TobiSGD said, most modern distros should do fine on that machine, so pick one most to your liking - I happen to really like Slackware!

TobiSGD · 06-27-2014, 07:44 PM

If dependency handling in Slackware is an issue for you (it wasn't for me, but nowadays I prefer the Gentoo approach to dependencies) you also might want to have a look at Salix. It is basically Slackware with dependency management and slimmed down installation media (one application per task).

turboscrew · 06-28-2014, 04:13 AM

Slackware looks laborous to try out. I guess there is no live CD?
What are the root and boot disks? Kernel and initrd?

turboscrew · 06-28-2014, 04:45 AM

What do you think about these:
- Mageia
- OpenSUSE
- Zorin
- CentOS
- Manjaro
- PCLinuxOS
- Gentoo

For a (mostly) embedded systems programmer and Thinkpad T42?
T42 = Pentium M (M 735 / 1.7 GHz, supports PAE)
RAM 1GB (333 MHz / PC2700), Max 2GB
ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 - 32 MB DDR

What I'm interested in:
- stability
- (embedded) programming tools available in repos
- light enough to be practical (for reference, Mint 13 MATE has been fine)
- Length of release support (Don't want to reinstall every couple of months)

ReaperX7 · 06-28-2014, 05:32 AM

Actually Slackware seems laborious but in reality its anything but. Dependency resolution is a fickle argument and the only time you'll need to resolve a dependency is when you add extra packages from SlackBuilds. Each package from SBo will tell you what it needs and its ultra simple to figure out.

turboscrew · 06-28-2014, 06:28 AM

Unless there is someone with multiple registrations, it seems that Slackware is getting votes. ;-)
Maybe I should give it a chance...

TobiSGD · 06-28-2014, 08:23 AM

Since the Slackware subforum of LQ is the official Slackware forum it shouldn't surprise that many people will recommend it here. If it is suitable for you is something that only you can decide.
Let's see:

Quote:

For a (mostly) embedded systems programmer and Thinkpad T42?
T42 = Pentium M (M 735 / 1.7 GHz, supports PAE)
RAM 1GB (333 MHz / PC2700), Max 2GB
ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 - 32 MB DDR

Any distro should do, but with a single core CPU and 1GB of RAM you will want to stay away from the heavy desktop environments (KDE 4, Gnome 3, Cinnamon, Unity). You should rather go for something lightweight, like MATE, XFCE, LXDE/LXQt or one of window managers (*box, Enlightenment, FVWM2, possibly one of the tiling WMs).

Quote:

- stability

Slackware, Debian, RHEL/CentOS/SL.

Quote:

- (embedded) programming tools available in repos

Con't comment on that, which are the specific programs that you need? If it only comes down to a text editor of your choice and the GCC compiler any distro will do.

Quote:

- light enough to be practical (for reference, Mint 13 MATE has been fine)

See above. How light a distro is is mostly determined by which desktop environment or window manager is used, to some extent also by other software, especially browser and office software, if you use those).

Quote:

- Length of release support (Don't want to reinstall every couple of months)

Some distributions have pretty long support (Slackware, RHEL/CentOS/SL) while other offer LTS versions (long term support, for example Ubuntu, Mint, possibly to some extent Debian in the future, openSuse's Evergreen versions). You could also use a rolling release distro, like Arch, Gentoo, PCLinuxOS, Manjaro, CRUX, ..., which constantly update (in some cases you can say which packages should be updated and which not) so that you don't have to reinstall ever, but this may be contrary to your "stability" requirement.

In any case, if you want to do serious work on a distribution I would think that a short look on a live-CD is not sufficient to determine if a distribution is the right one for you, you should do some real installations for testing purposes.

turboscrew · 06-28-2014, 09:17 AM

Quote:

which are the specific programs that you need

With embedded that tends to change. It depends on the HW at hand.
Most often eclipse, gdb (rather with graphical front end), cross-compilers, development frameworks, ...
At the moment I'm involved with development of a small embedded-targeted RTOS for i386-architecture.
The development is barely started, and I need to run the kernel in qemu using gdb remote debugging.
That's somewhat typical situation. I use eclipse project for editing - CDT GDB doesn't seem to work in my current installation(s) but crashes the eclipse. With "raw" gdb it works in my Ubuntu-machine, but qemu doesn't work in the T42. VirtualBox seems to work, but I don't know how to use the debugger.

I listed some systems that I consider now (in addition to Slackware), because I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Debian and Puppy, each for some years, and I pretty much know what they are like. As you see, There is Puppy (not used for development) and then there are deb-based distros. I used RedHat too, but it was a couple of decades ago, so I'd say I have no experience with todays rpm-based distros - nor Slackware.

(Note: what was Red Hat back then became Fedora Core later. It's not the same thing as RHEL or CentOS today.)

[edit]
Looks like my first Linux was Red Hat 3.0.3, I still seem to have the official disks. :-)

DavidMcCann · 06-28-2014, 11:25 AM

I use Salix (Slackware with added user-friendliness!) on my Thinkpad X31 (also Pentium M) and it works well. When I bought it secondhand, I tried CentOS, but it was a bit slow. One of the things Salix adds is dependency resolution and the package tool, slapt-get, is modeled on apt-get.

Incidentally, you may find this site useful:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki