I just came across some old Linux install disks I had... from 1999... Red Hat 6 and Mandrake 7.
What would be the least powerful, but still appropriate hardware to install either of these on?
Could they be installed on up-to-date hardware?
http://web.archive.org/web/20000831170817/htt … hcl-i.ld-2.html
Probably a 386 with 16+ MB of RAM
World's foremost 486 enjoyer.
Hamby wrote on 2020-03-17, 20:51:I just came across some old Linux install disks I had... from 1999... Red Hat 6 and Mandrake 7.
What would be the least powerful, but still appropriate hardware to install either of these on?
Could they be installed on up-to-date hardware?
Both Red Hat and Mandrake are pretty 'heavy' distros. The kernel would run on really old hw. I forget exactly when 386 support was deprecated in glibc, but possibly you could run the core system on a 386. However speaking from experience with Mandrake 7 on a Celeron 433 with 64MB of RAM in 1999 - that was already painfully slow. It also was a mess with very patchy hardware support, which was a bad match with a flashy desktop, and put me off Linux for another year. I then tried Debian 2.2 'Potato' on an old Pentium 60 I bought from my work for some symbolic amount - and it ran beautifully - and even supported some odd OEM hardware (Packard Bell modem/sound card) straight out-of-the-box. Moral then as now: if you want to run stuff on limited hardware, go for the dressed-down barebones version, not the huge all-guns-blazing monster. Mandrake was very much the Vista of the Linux world.
