historic linux distros ;-)
 

hi folks,

i have a p1 166mhz box lying around, and i suddenly thought, hey, why dont i fire it up with some old linux distro to see how it fares. to put things in perspective, i installed damnsmalllinux on it, which has a "light" window manager, and it just crawls. it has 64megs of edo-ram, a cdrom drive, and a 8.4 gig hard disk that has no important data on it.

anyone has any idea where i can download iso's of historic linux distros, perhaps redhat 1.0 or similar stuff? i'd like to go back in time and see how linux looked years before i was even aware it existed, in those good'ole days :-). the oldest distro on cd i have is redhat 6.2, so i'm looking for something older.

i have another faster system with a cd-burner, so writing the iso's shouldnt be a problem. i googled regarding old distros tonight, but didnt come up with much luck. i'm looking for a distro that has x-windows too, not just a console.

thanx,
guy.

I have got p1MMX 166, 96MB. I tried Slack 10.1 with Fluxbox window manager, and it is working fine . Also gnome on this Slack is working , but...... starting 5 minutes :) .

I think you won´t find so old distros... Maybe now are distros made for old (or very old) computers.. See www.distrowatch.com .

Look
 

Look at a mirror list for some distro, and once you get on a mirror, it should have directories for very old stuff. Just click on the oldest version there. I could find back to version 3.3 on slackware (they are on 10.1 now), and, unfortunately, only back to 6.2 on redhat. Just look around at different distros mirrors. Hope this helped.

happy hunting,

slackwarebilly:)

any distro can be installed on old pc

i installed redhat 7.0 on i486 with 16 mb ram once , tried windows 2000 first and it ejected the cd saying it needs high end pc to install itself:p

Did anyone mention zipslack? =)

that sounds like the perfect hardware (little to much HD space) for an IPCop system.

as for older distro, you might be able to find older distros as mentioned on mirror sites.

I have successfully installed SuSe 9.2 pro on an old box not much better then the one you have, but i did have over 128M ram too.

it took forever to boot, but ran very smooth all things considering. i was supprised.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-...distributions/
http://linux.ka.nu/
https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/rhasan/linux/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

thanx folks for all the replies and suggestions :-)

on my part, i loaded up redhat 6.2 tonight, and though the speed and responsiveness was pretty good, it was not a very "usable" desktop. the netscape browser had some problem displaying the linuxquestions.org page, i tried downloading firefox, and it downloaded 88kb out of 8mb, and exited, stuff like that. i think technology is moving ahead at such a fast rate, that every day, newer technologies are coming out, effectively obsoleting older ones. so afterall, the desktop was not "practical" to use any more. and i'm thinking it'll be worse if i manage to install redhat 1.0 (let alone get a copy ;p)

as mmm said, maybe i'll try slackware with fluxbox. not that i <need> that system...its just for kicks. maybe there was even a philosophical lesson with today's experience: the past is over and done with, look only ahead. right now, i'm happy with my 2ghz 64bit athlon with 512megs of ram ;-) and i'm already wondering when i'll be able to afford another 1gig stick :-)

i'll keep you posted of any happy developments ;-)

thanx,
guy.

That is best in Linux - It works on everything :) Did you hear that Linux is the only OS that works on PlayStation 3 (Sony Cell processor) ?

I think it will be also good idea to make clusters from so old PC. I think if you makes cluster from 2 PC like this, it will work 4 times faster....

--------------------
Sorry for grammar.....

hi all,

an update regarding the old box:

i spent the most part of today installing slackware 10.1 on this box, and found i learnt a lot about linux in the process. especially the "book" on the slackware site has a lot of info.

i installed xfce as the window manager, but sadly, this system is too old, i guess. i had to use the generic vesa driver for x, as the cirrus driver gave me max 640x480 rez. now i have 1024x768, but only 8-bit color. also, scrolling on webpages etc is very jerky and slow. infact, i am typing all this from this box itself. in console mode (no gui), playing an mp3 via mpg123 uses 60% of the cpu! and while i'm browsing with mozilla (which is itself painful), listening to a song in the background is impossible- music skipping and sputtering.

anyway, enough of cribbing. atleast i discovered slackware :-) but the good thing is, in text mode (no x), the system's fast (i know youre all laughing, even i am!) hopefully, without the temptation of x now, i can learn some cli commands.

i heard that these days, even home routers have processor speeds over and above 500mhz, so 166mhz is dead meat, i guess.

anyway,
guess i gotta sleep now...

-guy.

Slackware is really good distro. It is very stable, good for development, for router, for server. But is not very easy. :( And 166Mhz is not so old... router in my network is 166Mhz, 64Mb with OpenBSD (yes, also BSD are good for old PC) - working very good. I used similar machine for server - Slack, Apache 2 (PHP), MySQL. Also no problems ...