Porteus linux
http://www.porteus.org/

I agree, I use Debian family distros on very-old computers without great flaws on a daily basis. The hardware is far better supported than on new material, they are faster than new computers under window$ NT, so I don't understand where is the problem on this thread... It depends what you want to do with theses computers...

It is bad news (is it news??) but I have to fully support this statement. If you install the OS you have the freedom to choose your lightweight desktop and choose your applications. But in 2017 you hardly can afford not to install the latest web browser with all bells and whistles. Many websites, especially the commercial ones, are bloated over the top with animations, videos and gadgets.
That voids all efforts you make to keep the rest of you system lightweight. Having said that, even the most bloated desktops, like KDE, load your processor less than these web browsers. One should realize that most complicated desktop applications are compiled code, while complete-OS-in-a-web-browser-app is all scripted code.
I think the oldest system I have around is a 2004 HP/Compaq NC6230 laptop. Which runs KDE just fine. Until I start a web browser.
Memory use IS a problem with heavier DE, though. Often memory cannot be expanded anymore. Once the OS starts swapping on a 2GB there system is no remedy but turn off the system.
And I found playing of mp4 encoded movies a problem on older systems. Pure lack of processor power and too old a GPU to do the decoding smoothly.

jlinkels

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Yeah I fully agree, nothing to add, you said everything, the Web has become a hell. Thunderbird/Icedove can be pretty heavy at times too, and I never had the courage to migrate to another mail manager. Like I said, everything depends on the planned usage of the computer... but I'm just desperate to see that every Website needs now a computer thousand time more powerful than huge videogame needed a few years ago...

I've hit this snag, video converters worked.

Makes sense you can't do all the newfangled stuff on old stuff but still much, especially text &c; try Links2 and Randomplay,,, etc\weee...

One thing I've noticed, since my main HTPCs have really old pathetic processors (Sempron 3100+ PassMark 452 and Athlon 64 3200+ PassMark 490 ... for comparison a budget Pentium G4560 CPU has a PassMark of over ten times as much).

Don't use Firefox if you can help it. Chromium and Chrome are much zippier. Unfortunately, Chrome is no longer supported on 32 bit, and Chromium doesn't have DRM. This means that if you've got a 32 bit CPU, you've got little choice but to use Firefox for Netflix.

This sort of software issue has been increasingly a problem for 32 bit machines. My Sempron 3100+ machines are 32 bit only, and it's bad enough that I have seriously considered upgrading them to the best 64 bit CPU available for Socket 754 (Athlon 64 3400+ PassMark 544). But...okay, even though the upgrade is pretty darn cheap, the end result is still laughably slow compared to a $50 used computer off of eBay.

But in any case, if you're sad about the poor performance of web browsing with Firefox, try out Chromium or Chrome (if you need DRM and have a 64 bit CPU). You may be pleasantly surprised. It's actually an okay experience with a pathetic old CPU with PassMark 452.

(Note that there's no helping an Atom N450 seen on many netbooks and Windows 8 tablets...with a PassMark around 300, it's painfully slow even compared to a budget 2004 CPU.)

@IsaacKuo:

Thanks for the suggestion.

What about memory use. My experience is/was that on 2GB systems this is what happens. After booting the machine, the memory use is quite decent. Just over 1GB or so. Then after some days of use, memory use increases, although not more applications are open. "top" doesn't show any memory usage.

But the memory is still not free. Now this is a complicated matter in Linux. Memory is being used for caching if it is not used for processes. But if a process needs it, it should be freed and assigned to the process.

This is not what happened. Over time (usually a few days) memory was all used, and the system began using swap space. And as it seemed, the active processes were swapped out. Like KDE. The disk light was lighted solidly, the mouse cursor became irresponsive and the desktop clock came to a standstill.

It could happed when I opened a PDF, or just another tab in the web browser. The system was out of memory, started swapping and was stuck.

Sometimes I was able to CTRL-F1 to a console which took over 10 minutes. If I were happy I was logged in as root there, as authentication would never complete. I could kill KDE and then the system became normal. When I was not able to get to a console, swapping would continue for more than 12 hours, and ended when I pulled the power plug.

This happened on 1GB and 2GB systems, never on identical 4GB systems. I have tried different kernels and even different version of Debian at the time, but always the same behavior.

I have had long discussions on Debian forums, tried to adjust settings like "swappiness" but everything to no avail.

Did you ever see this and were you able to solve it?

jlinkels

i have ScientificLinux 6.8 running on a ancient ( almost ) Pentium 4 machine with a nvidia gforce 2 mx 400 card
it orignally had 256 meg ram -- now it has 1 gig ram

now i do have to downgrade Xorg to the version that was in SL 6.3 for the nvidia.run driver to work
but SL / CentOS / RHEL 5.11 will run and NOT need any hacking on 17 year old equipment

yes this came with xp in 2001

I have not experienced anything like this. However, it does match what I would expect from a "liveCD" or "frugal" type install (which I have never done). Those installs don't use a traditional root file system. Rather, they use a union of read-only compressed file system and read-write (non-compressed) tmpfs ram disk (which can be swapped out to swap, but does not have any normal physical file system backing).

With such a root filesystem, it would start off using a relatively modest amount of RAM (depending on the size of the compressed squashfs image). But it would progressively start using more and more RAM as various files are written to.

Or maybe...
Or maybe it's a KDE thing. I don't use KDE, I use XFCE4. My experience with Debian Stable (going back to Debian Sarge) has been that I could leave the thing running for ... well ... for as long as I felt like. Weeks, months...not usually more than a year, though, because of kernel security updates.

The main thing that could hog ram is the web browser, though, depending on whether one or more tabs are memory hogging web pages. Sometimes, the best thing is to just close the web browser and open it fresh (I have it set to reload whatever tabs were open when it was closed, but this starts the memory hogging from scratch).

One of the machines I leave on all the time has 512MB of RAM; it idles at 77MB of RAM usage. I also have a couple machines with 1GB of RAM that I use for various utility server things (but which also have a GUI with XFCE4 running for various graphical things). They idle at 157MB and 192MB of RAM consumption. They are rarely rebooted.

I have one really old Pentium 4 machine that I've been using to HandBrake a big box set of PAL discs...very slow going, at maybe 13fps. It has only 512MB of RAM. With XFCE4, HandBrake, and Thunar running it's at 254MB of RAM consumption. It's been going at it for about a week now; it'll be busy for another couple weeks processing all of these PAL discs. (Normally, I just play DVDs directly in a media HTPC's DVD drive. But since these PAL discs are from a different region, it's not so simple.)

And I have several general use machines which have 2GB of RAM (these laptops have 2x1GB RAM sticks). Not good for having a zillion tabs open, but otherwise fine for general use. This includes my main router/server/HTPC (I put all of these functions into a single computer to simplify getting things up and running for my wife). It's at 400MB of RAM use, including Chromium showing YouTube.

Basically, I have no issues with running XFCE4 on Debian Stable on machines with 2GB of RAM or even much less.

Just some random reporting... I had a very old Compaq desktop computer that refused to boot with 3.x series kernels. Only 2.6.x kernels worked, as did FreeBSD 10 with stock kernel.

I guess it was a firmware-related issue, but the computer had 128 MB of memory and some people said that newer kernels would require more than that to boot. Tiny Core Linux didn't boot either, however.

Hi,
Progression may not always be good for legacy hardware since the abilities of older hardware cannot meet the needs of current Gnu/Linux.

Your best bet would be to use a Gnu/Linux that did support the legacy hardware. That would mean that you would need to roll back to earlier Gnu/Linux. You would need to investigate to see what Gnu/Linux fits best. But be aware that Gnu/Linux may not meet security needs for present applications or even the Kernel.

I know support for Slackware is all the way back to 13.37 which was released back in 2011. Further back will likely get you a working system but security risks are there.

You are doing clients no service by installing Win/XP since they will be open to loads of security risk even though Microsoft did update some flaws in Xp for corporate users. If you can even get the patched Xp is in question now.

Look at this sticky; Newbie alert: 50 Open Source Replacements for Windows XP

Hope this helps.
Have fun & enjoy!

For charity purposes, I'd say ditch any Pentium 4...really, any single core machine (including far more modern Atom N450 netbooks and such). But Core 2 Duo is very usable for general purpose computing.

Oh - a far better use for any ancient single core machine is a retro gaming machine - especially retro DOS gaming. Find some retro gaming enthusiast who will truly appreciate the thing.

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Or: jukebox, kids to learn on, library,,, &c.

Tho a Raspberry Pi or like is better on the grid\etc...