will slackware work on a cyrix 233mhz with 32mb of ram?
 

Hi,

I've got an old cyrix 233mhz with 32mb of ram. The website says that slackware will run on 486 with 64mb of ram which is unheard of for a 486. Is there anyway I can get slack to boot with less memory?

Thanks

Some distros will let you use a swap partition as part of the neccessary ram needed.
i.e. 32mb ram + 32mb(+) swap partition.
(You will need to create your swap partition before trying to install.)

Thanks fatmac. When I boot slackware with huge.s mem=32 it freezes after "Booting the kernel." is there anyway to get a more verbose trace of what's happening?

Sorry, I quit using Slack some time ago, but hang on & a Slacker should be able to go through it with you.

The last Slackware release to be able to run on 32 MB of RAM according to its Slackware_HOWTO was Slackware 11, that doesn't get any more security fixes anymore since August 1, 2012. For Slackware 14.1 the minimum recommended is 128 MB. So I'm afraid the response be no, at least without a lot of work, that in my opinion wouldn't be worthwhile considering that used (but still a lot more powerful than yours) computers are cheap nowadays.

In case your computer be not on a network at all you could try to install Slackware 11 though, as then remote attacks at least would be out of question.

Thank for the information. I'll try slackware 11. I've got nothing better to do than to poke around with an old pc anyways. :-)

Oh, and in case anyone sees this thread in the future; I'm using is an old compaq presario 1230.

If you want to try something more recent than Slackware 11 I would recommend to look at NetBSD, which has significantly lower system requirements.

...and it would be up to date for security fixes. :)

Good luck with your experiments.

I'd like to thank you both. Free and netbsd look like far better UNIX style operating systems than linux and the great thing is; all of my c programs that I've developed still will work!

NetBSD will pretty much run on anything.

If you are still interested in answering your question on slackware working on such of a machine, and willing to take the challenge, I can give some tips. As Didier said it would be alot of work for something that old. Understanding more of the goal in mind might help too.

I would recommend using SlitaZ for a machine that old. It's more optimized. I'm using it on an old Thinkpad here with 256MB RAM.

Slackware works on that, too - but not nearly as good.

Don't bother with any kind of modern Linux on that.

Give NetBSD or OpenBSD a try.

Hi kg4cjv

I agree with this

and newer versions of both Open/Net use a '64 bit' time.h, thus no 2038 issue on 32 bit systems. Since you mention "c programs", that may be useful to you.

I also have a similar PC which I use as a backup system, but it has a bit more memory. It always had a rough time with 2.6 kernels on that machine :(

NetBSD works quit well on it and I expect the same may be true for OpenBSD

John

I use either a stronger Slackware system or more short-term RAM. It should be no problem to run Slackware in 32 MB of RAM. To install it, though, may be another matter. My last attempt to install in 64 MB of RAM ended early in boot as well. Really, 128 MB would a much better start, and 384 MB is fairly comfortable.

Just curious, does "mem=32M" do anything different from the "mem=32" cited earlier in the thread?

NetBSD should your best bet out of the box. You'll need RAM for that as well, just not during the install (I hope).

Should you live in central Florida, I might be willing to part with one of my Pentium III boxes and a noisy, zeroed IDE disk so you can have a slightly better start. [IOW, I'm not shipping it but would be willing to hand it to you at a safe public meeting place.] You'll probably need the CD-ROM drive out of the PC you have, though.