Choosing Linux distributions and software for old or antique computer
 

I have searched the forums for similar threads, and although I did not find anything like this, there may be threads that are similar but not named as such so I must first apologize if this is a duplicate thread.

I built a computer recently with the intent to use it for Windows 98-era gaming. It works just fine for that, but I also wanted to run various flavors of Linux alongside the various Windows editions I have each OS is on it's own dedicated hard drive, so no dual-boot concerns here. I wasn't really sure what category to put this under, so here we are in General.

I am no Linux newbie, although I'm not exactly a professional either. I have worked with old and new hardware, although my experience with older hardware is entirely limited to various forms of Windows, the only Linux I've used on old hardware is Debian 9. With that said, I'm undertaking a relatively large project, and instead of going through and testing distributions one by one, I figured I would reach out to the community to see if anyone has experience with this sort of thing that they can share. Any advise is greatly appreciated, and I am 100% willing to try anything that is suggested, and I will gladly post follow-ups to let people know what works and what does not work.

This is intended to not only help myself, but also to help anyone else who is attempting a similar project, people who could benefit from a list of distros that work with hardware from this era.

I would like to find out what distro(s) can run on the following hardware:
Pentium III 933
GeForce FX 5700 (AGP 256, DX9 capable)
512 or 768 Mb RAM (swapping out ram occasionally due to OS limitations)

The system has a variety of expansion cards that I swap out occasionally, and I am not expecting any older form of Linux to work flawlessly with any number of them. I'll list the cards, but I'm mainly concerned with "what will work" and not "what will work perfectly"

Soundblaster Live
Razer AC-1
generic USB card #1, 2 and 3
Firewire card
LSI logic SATA card (purely so I don't have to rely on old IDE hard drives... Only new drives for this build!)
Matrox Millennium (purely for testing)


Here are distributions that I have tested:

Debian 9 (works but has some issues, likely due to a lack of SSE2 support. no sound on Razer card)
Centos 7 (works, but I cannot get any software to install at all, could be my own incompetence, I will test more later)
Centos 6.9 (works, but same software installation problem. Probably my own fault)
MineOS (based on Debian, so no surprise that it works, has same issues)
Ubuntu 16.04 (worked more or less fine, just very slow. no sound on Razer card)
Ubuntu 18.04 (locked up usually before getting to install screen... got to install screen once, but it locked up when selecting installation destination)


Here are some distributions that I would like to try, but have not gotten around to:

Fedora WS 30
Lubuntu
Puppy Linux
Linux Lite
Ubuntu Mate


Any suggestions would be great! As I said, I'm 100% willing to try out any distro, I'm simply looking for suggestions so I don't have to burn a hundred DVDs and try every distro to see what works and what doesn't.

I know that some modern versions of Linux will not work, but I'm looking to see what does and does not work. Also, I'm 100% willing to go back to older releases to get certain distros working, such as Arch (I don't meet the listed requirements of 1 Gb RAM and 1GHz CPU so I'm not even going to try modern Arch)

Thanks again for looking, and if you are here with the same question as I have, I will be updating this thread whenever I try a new distro, listing the results in as much detail as I can muster.

I have another computer with an OG Pentium 75 and 24 Mb of RAM, but I'm not even going to THINK about trying Linux on that until I'm done with this project.


Updated information:

Ubuntu 18.04 works fine now, I had originally tested with a FX 5500, but it works no problem now with my FX 5700. Slow, but functional.

Try AntiX, Bionic Puppy, TinyCore, Slackware 14.2, or if you dont need updated apps over at ArchiveOS they have older versions of many cool but dead distros
https://archiveos.org/linux/

linus72, thanks so much for the archive link!

For the OP, this one looks useful:
https://archiveos.org/legacyos/

In the course of seeking my true linux love, I tested over 150 distros... but I didn't burn 150 CDs/DVDs. I prepped ONE flash drive with Easy2Boot and copied a pile of ISOs to the drive, then booted from that. (Not sure when USB boot became common...) Of course not all the older distros will boot this way, but costs nothing to try it.

Easy2Boot is basically Rufus with a nice Windows installer. Drastically speed things up by running the MakeThisDriveContiguous script after EACH file copied, otherwise it can take forever and waste a lot of space.

http://www.easy2boot.com/

My cheap multiboot solution, once they're installed, is a hotswap drive bay and a pile of laptop HDs. :)

===

Old and older...

Way back in the before times, I had RedHat6 on my P233. This had glacial performance and eventually committed seppuku... not recommended.

Next effort was Mandrake 7.5 (KDE) on ... I think it was a P3-1.2GHz, probably 256mb RAM (was still pricey stuff) and it ran very well, tho had a lot of holes and deficiencies. But if I were resurrecting antique hardware and wanted a full-featured distro of similar vintage, I think I would go with Mandrake (er, Mandriva). I can tell you it shaped my expectations for all time.

My old laptop is PIII-1GHz, 540mb RAM, so in the same ballpark. For a while it ran Wary Puppy -- ran like the wind, very stable, tho wireless was an adventure (worked once, then never again) and sound never worked at all. [Laptop presently has TinyXP and everything works, so not hardware defects.]

Had Mint/Cinnamon (v17, I think) on an AMD 3200+ (32bit) with random other hardware and 2GB RAM -- so about double the specs, tho in Real Life only a little faster than your P3 -- and it ran pretty good, tho GRUB was unstable (some untoward interaction with the video config util; I gather this has since been fixed.)

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll add Legacy OS to my list of distros to test! As far as USB boot, this motherboard is unable to boot from USB drives which means I am limited to physical media D: I was prepared for this though, and I have multiple drives I can swap in and out alongside the optical drive (ZIP, 3.5 and 5.25 floppy, SuperDisk, the list goes on) so it isn't TOO much of an issue. I made sure to install a DVD drive, so I can use my retail copies of Windows XP, Vista and 7, as well as larger install .ISO files of Linux (although my preferred method is net install). Hey, at least I can load any LiveCD I want!

Thanks again! Also, Thanks Linus72, I wasn't aware of that archive!

Maybe not... I haven't tested this, but from the description it should do the trick:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/1682...-wont-let-you/

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

Most chips marked and marketed as P75 are actually P90 and can therefore be 'overclocked' (run at their real speed). Improves performance more than you'd think because it also ups the bus speed. If yours is a true P75, worst that happens is it won't boot when set to 90MHz.

I imagine the micro-distros might work, and I vaguely recall there are a couple with a simple GUI that runs on very little RAM, but I haven't tried any myself. (Or didn't get anywhere -- Damn Small wouldn't run for me.) Lessee...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_Core_Linux
Sysreqs pretty close, 28mb ... depends if it checks and refuses, or just groans and complains but runs anyway, as some things will do....

....my back-when hardware testing rig (because it would speak to anything) was a 486DX4-100 which at the time happened to have 8mb RAM. One day I was testing HDs and hooked up the wrong one... and found myself watching Win2K booting up... took about five minutes to reach the desktop, but after that was only a little sluggish. (Office2K was usable too!) Its min sysreqs are a Pentium and (IIRC) 64mb RAM, but here it was, running well enough to scrape by, on a tiny fraction of its supposed requirements. (And no swapfile.)

Well, here's the ultimate... requires a mere 386 and 3mb RAM:
https://archiveos.org/basic/

Go here, sort Sysreq or File Size, to approximate requirements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-...x_distribution

AntiX, MX Linux, Slackware, Debian, Tiny Core Linux, SliTaz Linux, maybe Puppy Linux, would be my starters, all available in 32bit too. :)

I have a Pentium M laptop (2002 or 2003 vintage) that runs Xubuntu. I had to add Midori, as Firefox is a bit slow, but otherwise it's fine.

Your real problem will be the absence of SSE2, which is required by most (all?) modern Web-browsers.

This guy is compiling modern browsers to run on old systems (WinXP, which usually means Win2K as well; and a few versions for non-SSE CPUs). I've been using his builds by preference, because in my observation they run better than the originals.

http://rtfreesoft.blogspot.com/2019/...-20190629.html

He also posts his source patches. So someone who knows what they're doing (this would not be me) could build versions for linux.

Apparently it's not very difficult; the big boys just don't want to do it.

Working on testing tonight, hard to find time during the week due to work, but with the Linux OS archive and the browser recompiling linked by Reziac, as well as the suggestions by fatmac and Linus72 I should now be well armed to begin testing and returning with data on what was tested and how it performed (if I even got it to work at all)

Thank you for the information and suggestions so far!

Sparky has an edition that supposedly runs on a 486 (and I can attest that it's pretty slick on middle-aged hardware), but where you'd find a 486 with 256mb RAM escapes me. (386DX could theoretically support 4GB, but the most I've ever heard of was 1GB in a custom gov't-owned portable that had no HD. In Real Life, the occasional whopping great server might hit 128mb. Normal systems maxed out at 16mb. Tho some crazies over at Vogons put a lot of effort into maxing out the 486 platform.)

https://sparkylinux.org/system-requirements/

Must be a bad habit developed back in my days of being a DOShead, but it's pretty fun to see how much you can stuff into so little. :D

Forgot about this'un, but someone in Italy is maintaining a 32bit fork of PCLinuxOS (which has better-than-average performance for a full distro). Not sure how far back into the mists of time their version supports, or minimum sysreqs.

http://www.liberainformatica.it/uplos32/

If you choose Trinity desktop, you may be able to get some software and updates, as described on the Install page. Trinity is an updated/maintained form of KDE3.5, and looks/acts more or less similar to WinXP.

I have PCLOS64/KDE (and Trinity) on an early Core2Duo, and it runs rings around Mageia on an i7.

Ar least mine only supported 16 MB max (486dx2/66, memory is in chip sockets ON the motherboard, no memory sticks or such yet).
BTW that system is from 1994 and was the first I ever ran Linux on.

Sorry that I haven't updated this post yet with what I've found! I can say that I finally got Ubuntu 18.04 working, this was after I added the FX 5700, perhaps the problem was with my original FX 5500? Anyway, I've been distracted by a side project (dual xeon workstation) and I'm now about to get back to this one. Sorry for the hold up!

Which type Piii do you have? With my Socket 370, and 384M RAM, last used distros were openSUSE 13.1 & 13.2, and Kubuntu 12.04. With my last Slot1, and 512M RAM, last distros were openSUSE 12.2 and Tumbleweed. All were upgrades from prior releases. AGP cards were Matrox.

Major distros provide installation configurations for installation via network. Mine are mostly installed via HTTP without burning anything, which I started doing with SuSE 8.0 17 years ago. Once Grub is on a target disk, it can load network installation kernels and initrds downloaded in advance. On blank disks I use Knoppix to setup Grub, then start installing.