What's the OLDEST computer you have installed linux on?

**blueturtl** · February 2nd, 2009

Mine.

Pentium 233 MHz (later upgraded to AMD K6-III+ 400 MHz)
64 MB RAM (later upgraded to 256 MB)
6 GB HDD (later switched to 120 GB)
24x CD-writer
Dual floppy drives
S3 ViRGE DX video card (later switched to Matrox Millennium G200)
3Dfx Voodoo2 3D-accelerator
Yamaha OPL3 Sax sound card (later switched to Turtle Beach Montego A3DXstream)
Realtek NE2000 10 Mbit ethernet
2 USB 1.1 ports (later added 4 USB 2.0 ports with pc-card)

Despite the heavy upgrades this system is so dang old.

Apps used with the system (after upgrade):
OS: Debian Etch 4.0 (same)
GUI: X with Fluxbox (same)
Browser: Links2 or Opera (Firefox 3)
Email: Sylpheed (same)
IM: CenterIM-UTF8 (Gajim)
IRC: irssi (same)
Audio: MOC (same)
Video: Mplayer (same)
P2P: rtorrent (same+linuxdcpp)
Others: rxvt-unicode, emacs, zxgv, xpdf, gimp...

I usually run all my apps at the same time, here follows a subjective performance review:

RAM is most crucial, even with a slow CPU the system is very usable if you have 128+ megs of RAM. With 64 megs or less, one must rely mostly on command line apps or very light GUI apps. With 256 megs or RAM, I can even use multiple tabs in Firefox.

Forget Youtube though, Flash requires a 1GHz+ CPU and the quality of videos is still bad enough not to bother.

**kbutcher5** · February 2nd, 2009

An old unnamed laptop, 64megs of ram 433mhz, 5gb hdd

**unoodles** · February 2nd, 2009

I think you guys all lose.
I have an old computer that originally ran MSDOS.
I don't know the CPU specs right now. (Ill edit this later).
It has 128k ram. Yes I'll say it again 128 kilobytes.
I booted a-linux on a floppy. (asm.sourceforge.net)
There is no hard drive anymore, it broke, but I think it had about 10MB.

**ebernan** · March 23rd, 2009

I am typing this on a pentium 2 350 Mhz machine: intel 440 bx mobo, 512 mb pc100 ram seen as 256 by bios, ati rage pro graphics card. While this isn't anywhere near the slowest machine in this thread I did manage to get Intrepid running on it. I didn't even have to use any of the alternative install disks or methods, it took over an hour to install and the installer hung at 95% but seemed to boot fine after a reset. The computer runs gnome a little slow and desktop effects won't work but it's entirely usable and even seems faster than win 95 did when the rig was new(96 or 97 I believe).

Last week I installed Intrepid on a 1.4 Ghz athlon machine with a geforce2 mx 440(64 mb) and was shocked when desktop effects actually worked, and even more surprisingly it didn't slow things down. I installed emerald as well but it did slow things down so I took it back off.

My next linux project is on the other end of the spectrum. I will be deleting the win 7 partition on my new i7 rig and trying a few linux distro's. I'm curious to see how multithreaded some of the linux apps are and whether they can utilize all 8 threads. Besides win 7 doesn't like any of my games so what's the point.

**MasterNetra** · March 23rd, 2009

A abacus, just add sticker.

**JackieChan** · March 23rd, 2009

Originally Posted by Borbus

I used to run Arch on my pentium 2 233MHz box. It had 128MB of RAM (I upgraded it) and originally had a 4.3GB Quantum Bigfoot, but I upgraded it to an 80GB at some point. I didn't run X on this box.

That's cool!

**billgoldberg** · March 23rd, 2009

Originally Posted by tuebinger

I just installed Edubuntu 6.10 on my mom's ten-year-old Dell, which has a whopping 4.3 GB hard drive and 66 megs of RAM. I was afraid it might be a no-go for awhile because it was such a SLOW install... The installer actually went into 'low memory' mode while installing, and said I should create a swap file as soon as possible! All went well though, and now the kids are enjoying all the games...

so what's the oldest computer you've installed linux on?

I install Ubuntu 8.10 yesterday on an 8 year old APTEC pc.

Never heard of that brand, everything worked OOTB.

**afm93** · March 23rd, 2009

An old Windows ME machine. I first installed Xubuntu, but I hate the XFCE environment, so I installed Linux Mint Felicia Fluxbox Edition.

**Dragonbite** · March 23rd, 2009

I got an (I believe) 2001 Pentium I w/MMX technology ( @233 MHz) running with 64 MB of RAM and I tried a few distributions on it; DSL, TinyMe and Suse 9.1 (w/KDE) were the most successful ones to install.

I'm actually now looking at setting it up again, and installing Ubuntu Server ed. to make it into a (portable) web server which I can fool around with. If I had 2 NICs in it I would make it into a router/firewall/content filter, but it only has 1 and it's in the PCMCIA slot (no internal NIC) and there is only 1 USB 1.0 on board.

Oh, actually even older than that is the Sony Vaio desktop I bought in 2000 (P3 @ 500 MHz with 128 MB ram) which I had Edubuntu running on it for a while. At that time it was the kids AND it was my primary computer.

Thankfully I've moved up... to about 1.4 GHz (laptop).