I wanted to delay for better pics but since ReFracture beat me to it, here goes:
Machine is an HP Kayak XA, P-II/333, 256MB RAM, onboard Cirrus Logic video card. It has a SCSI controller but I'm using an IDE HDD.

For now, installation was done by preparing the HDD on another computer, but I will also try installing directly on this machine. I tried Slackware 14.1 (didn't even try 14.2) and 13.37.

First try: 14.1. In my paranoia about free memory (althought 256MB would prove plentiful) I started by using generic kernel and initrd but it booted fine with huge as well.

By the way, notice what neofetch does to the console (see the prompt on the last line). I seem to remember that it was possible to switch back to normal charset (some combination like ^V and O or somesuch) but I couldn't remember/find the sequence. Solved by cat-ing a file that contains the terminal reset sequence (ESC-c)

After some fruitless attempts to run X (X server dumps core when running xorgsetup), I switched to 13.37. Again, I didn't use the regular installation process. On 13.37 I didn't bother with initrd, started directly with huge.

Console:


This time xorgsetup goes fine.


And for old times' sake:


Next stop, for medium mode, a Pentium laptop

@ReFracture: I didn't know about inxi, I'll try that too.

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I see there is competition here. Well I'll go and try to install Slackware on my abacus...

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Well this thread has become very interesting indeed. ReFracture and gaitos, your experiments have been impressive to witness so far and I've been staring at your screenshots for quite a while now.

Now isn't that interesting. I always thought that the ascii art was inside the neofetch folder somewhere. I wonder what is accountable for that. I notice, according to man neofetch, that some functions are disabled below 1Ghz. But still, I don't know why that would make any difference to something like ascii art [maybe it doesn't]. Also it's interesting that it doesn't display the name of the OS.

Well done for getting x to start, looks fantastic. I also hadn't heard of XV before so I'll check that out. Very nice stuff indeed. Do you plan to keep your install[s]?

So this is a Pentium I? Looking forward to seeing what will become of that and which Slackware version you'll use. It's no surprise that some people on this forum like challenges.

You may jest but someone managed to install Arch on their typewriter.

I can't really offer much in return, so here's a photo of Alan Parsons in the studio.

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we still can compete on installing a systemd free distro first on an abacus

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Just a quick reply re. neofetch: It's related to the distro, not machine: on my regular EeePC (that also has 13.37) it displays the same penguin. See picture:



Of course, this not being console, it looks better.

By the way, neofetch was new for me as well, now I have a new toy to try on all my machines

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Actually, here at least it looks the same. I assume that as gaitos suggested it's a charset issue for this system (lack of UTF8 support on the console, probably, or wrong charset).

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Fooling around is so pleasant!





However, 13.37 is not really usable on such an old machine. It feels quite slugghish (even without X) and I suspect that 11.0 (or even older) would be better suited to this machine. Not much older, however, since I think that kernels older than 2.4 had poor/inexistent support for PCMCIA (that is required for network connectivity).

On the other hand.. I think that the 486 wouldn't feel much worse, so.. onto the next (that one won't be a laptop!) I can see two options: either continue with 13.37 (that seems to be working on 486 as well) or try an older distribution (2.4 based) and try to compile bash 3.2 for it.

As an aside:
- I will keep 13.37 on the Kayak (it had NetBSD along with other OSes but its original HDD broke down)
- on the Toughbook I had a rudimentary Slackware 11.0 (and I can't remember the reason why!) but without X or even gcc. I think it was used some years ago for some experiments. However, I think that 11.0 (maybe even older?) would be a better fit for it.

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This is getting more and more interesting. Very nice to see the machine in situ there, along with cranberry juice or whatever that is [I like the Skyrim coaster]. The keyboard on that CF-25 looks awesome. How long does neofetch take to compile on such a machine? I know it's just a shell script, but is it still a split second or does it take something between 5 and 10 seconds? Or longer?

Very interested to see whatever you're going to attempt next. The photos are great and inxi was a very good idea too. I don't have machines anywhere near this old, I think my oldest is my 2009 netbook, which still runs 14.2. You should get extra points for inserting your own 'medium mode'.

It looks at /etc/os-release. This addition was requested by forum member ruario to allow better support for detecting Slackware without Slackware specific code (otherwise, you would've had to have a specific check for /etc/slackware-version). It was added in the development of 14.0 (in fact, with the announcement of RC3).

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(wrong thread)

Grampa anecdote:

Back when I was running Slackware 3.0 on dumpster-dive hardware, I found a minimal system would run okay on 8MB of RAM with no swap, or on 4MB of RAM with at least 4MB of swap. Not a trivial decision to make when hard drives were a mere 10MB or 20MB in size.

For years the house LAN got its internet connectivity from an i386SX-16 with 4MB RAM and 4MB swap acting as a router for a 14.4kbps PPP connection with A2I networks (rahul.net), forwarding packets to an NE2000 with BNC (which meant I could string up any number of systems on the same network without spending money on a hub -- was pretty broke back then).

Fast forward to today:

I'm still mostly running on free or very cheap hardware. A previous employer let me take home a dozen retired Pentium-D Supermicro PDSMP-I servers, and seven of those are still functioning. They used to run Slackware 13.1, but have since been upgraded to Slackware 14.1. A friend who works for a Fortune 500 company in SF says they're about to retire a few hundred older Xeon systems, and he's in charge of disposing of them, so I may be replacing the Pentium-D's soon.

From the same employer I have an older desktop, with an original Core (not Core2) processor and 4GB of memory. It's running Slackware 14.1 and I use it as a "beater" system -- something I can toss into the back of a truck to take somewhere, or leave out in a not-quite-weatherproof shed for a few days to use away from the house, without worrying about whether it breaks or not. Because if it does, so what? It's just a beater. It's nice having a spare system to take into situations I'd feel uncomfortable exposing my nice expensive workstation.

Recently I've taken to picking up older Lenovo Thinkpads from Ebay and Craigslist for odd tasks. They're great because Linux (and specifically Slackware) works very well on them, no compatibility issues with 14.2, they draw little power, have integrated battery backup, and don't need a crash cart wheeled over to them before I can do console work.

There are tons out there for $15 or $20. At that price, why not?

The Pentium-D's live in a 19" cabinet in the wellhouse (which I call my "datashack"). There's a Lenovo T510 running Slackware 14.2 acting as the datashack "controller" -- it bridges/firewalls the datashack LAN with the house LAN, monitors the temperature, reboots the other machines in there (which are on a networked power strip) and turns the air conditioner on and off.

Another Lenovo T510 acts as a dedicated testing machine. It sits behind my workstation running the latest Slackware64-current and I ssh into it whenever there are -current updates to do the slackpkg dance and make sure everything works. I loved it when the bsdgames package got updated because it justified me playtesting /usr/games/phantasia for a few hours :-D

I used to have a much older Thinkpad (R53, I think?) as a VPN gateway -- working from home, I had to use my employer's VPN software, which clobbered the network configuration and could potentially spy on my non-work-related activity. The solution was to isolate the VPN software on the R53, and do my work on my workstation, and route my work-related traffic through the R53. I'm not using it anymore because work policy has relaxed somewhat, and now I can just use a regular ssh tunnel through my office workstation. The R53 is sitting on a shelf waiting for another role.

Maybe T510's aren't OLD-"old" hardware, but given how cheap they are, going any older hardly makes any sense.

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Hardmode! 33.28 bogomips!

A 66MHz 486 named Amigo. It's the first time I really use it, it was given to me some years ago and I just stored it in my collection, until now.

Despite having a DX4 CPU, it is configured as a DX2 (66MHz, instead of 100). It has 2 HDDs installed, but they are quite small: 270MB each. I installed 3*16MB SIMMs to make sure memory won't be lacking.

First failed attempt was to take the 13.37 HDD that I used in the Kayak (P-II) and try to boot from it. It hangs on "now booting the kernel" (and it takes a while to get there, decompressing the kernel takes forever: minutes, I think). When writing memtest86 to the HDD and adding it to LILO I thought I should also add the installation kernel for Slackware 11.0, just to see if it would boot. And indeed it booted fine. But I would not have enough patience to use the regular install process, so back to a faster machine for fast install. By that I mean:
Script was inspired by the Xen installation instructions. All machines in this story were installed in a similar manner.
Note: /proc is needed at a later stage; I think either initrd complains if it's missing when I chroot $DESTMP

Good news! After a long hard wait, it starts fine. I disable most of what I think is not needed, to speed up next boots. Next, xorgconfig - memories of xf86config from decades past. X is functional!

Neofetch needs newer bash, 3.2.48 should be enough. scp... takes a while to negotiate before asking for a password. Yep, on this hardware crypto is a significant overhead.

./configure and.... wait, no. This is too much. Have you ever seen each configure line taking around 10 seconds? Some of them even more! Well, the Kayak is faster and should be able to finish this in a reasonable amount of time. I move the drive, boot without problems (ah, the pleasures of generic IDE) and int's way faster. But what's this? i686? No, you don't! ./configure --build=i486
GNU bash, version 3.2.48(1)-release (i486-pc-none)
Good enough. I don't install this bash, I'll just use the binary. Back to the Amigo.

The new bash runs fine, short moment of confusion when neofetch still complains about a syntax error.. ah, right #!/usr/bin/env bash
Let's go around that one



It's interesting that inxi still works fine, no special requests whatsoever.

Starting xv to grab a picture gave me an idea. Wouldn't it be more interesting if..

..I were to open a photo on it? And take another photograph, of course.
I hope to have more pictures (with all the machines) tomorrow, if anyone is interested. Speaking of pictures,
It's "Aperol Spritz" and in fact it's there because I forgot the coaster on the table. Then I thought it would look nice. Good power of observation regarding Skyrim, btw! Re. neofetch, no chance of split second! I now started it with time so its duration will be visible. On the Toughbook it took almost 10 seconds to run (somewhat more under X and less on the console). As you can see, on the 486 it's almost double.. and it fits the frequency ratio nicely (120 vs 66).

Conclusion: possible, but not recommended. As before, the gap between software and hardware generations is way too large. I think Slackware 3.0 would be great for this computer and maybe I'll try. But that's obvious beside the challenge.. and quite off-topic, so I'll stop here

I agree with ttk, this was more for the challenge and nostalgia, there is no practical purpose to this exercise. But I enjoyed it!

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gaitos, you've really come through in spades. I very much enjoyed your pictures and stories of how you got everything to work. And surely you must be the owner/producer of the neofetch shot of the oldest hardware that exists. That prawn cocktail-coloured neofetch is just marvellous to look at.

What this brings to mind is that machines come and go but Slackware stays. This says something about the temporary nature of hardware and the permanence of software. I have four laptops but three of those are just sitting in another house about 50 miles away. I have components in boxes and cupboards which may never get used again, but Slackware is on two of my machines here in London [and two in the other house] and I can't see that changing.

Please share more pics when you can get round to it, gaitos. What a great exercise and if you come across any more older machines please consider putting an older Slack on there for our entertainment!

Never tried this but it's being promoted here a bit at the moment. I actually thought you may have had Campari in that glass, which would have gone quite well with the old school theme.

EDIT: Thanks for introducing me to the time command.

lads, enjoying this tread, still second thoughts:

in the day when *box vs XFCE made significant difference in rendering time, also re-compiling kernel made much sense:

1. load times
2. noticeably faster execution
3. not many options where needed/present on those hardware but the lacking RAM was sometimes a issue...

100% enjoy the old hardware, had once a setup with remote login - Firefox ran in server/client model quite well on 266MHz off both machines (~ Slackware 11.2 era)...
both machines had jumpers for CPU set up

When I first started using Linux on a machine with 250 MB RAM, I always built my own kernels because the boot time was intolerably slow otherwise. Also it meant I didn't need an initrd, which further slowed down and complicated things. But I'm too old to bother with that now, except on LFS.