shamino wrote:

Recently I've been experimenting with possible linux distros to install on a Pentium DOS/Win9x machine. Not for everyday use but for system administration stuff, including repartitioning (gparted), disk imaging (dd), easy mounting of network shares (samba) and transferring files with the rest of the LAN.
Those are the main goals. Secondary bonuses would include light desktop capability and good 2D GUI acceleration with old video cards (S3 and Matrox are most likely to be used, but Voodoo3 is possible and I'd like it to adapt to changes easily).
I've observed that while newer distros claim to have drivers for these old cards, they perform like they're in plain VESA mode, or don't work at all. The drivers say they're "fully accelerated" in man pages, and that might be true for the drivers themselves, but something has broken them at some point, and from what little I understand I think it's x.org.

You'll probably be ok with S3 - I have a pentium II with a Savage 4 in it, and both Linux and OpenBSD perform OK. Matrox do have basic acceleration, but it's not exactly speedy.

The reason is the driver architecture behind X is on about its fourth iteration. Linux is now using KMS drivers, as are some of the BSDs. Before that was EXA, and XAA. In 1995, a G200 was fast, in 2016 it struggles to run modern X, even with a lightweight window manager (I have a G200e (PCIe G200) embedded in my main server motherboard running at 1x. Damn, it's slow). For quite old cards NetBSD might be the best option - its X drivers are quite old.

Why are you concerned about disk partitioning and imaging on a pentium? It'll be radically slower than a modern box, and you'll be running 100Mb/s at best rather than gigabit upwards.

I'd advise using parted rather than gparted. Any time you need to do disk recovery it's not unlikely you won't be in a GUI. Anything gnome based may struggle on a pentium, and quite possibly simply not work due to the lack of SSE/SSE2.

If you *really* need to faff around with an MBR based disk, I'd recommend using OpenBSD's fdisk. It's not friendly, but it's possible to achieve things that aren't easily possible elsewhere, such as playing around with the protective MBR on a GPT disk (not something I recommend as a matter of course, but this is one way of sharing a disk between OS X on a hackintosh, and Windows/Unix. Windows and Linux see the same disk very differently)

ynari wrote:

Why are you concerned about disk partitioning and imaging on a pentium? It'll be radically slower than a modern box, and you'll be running 100Mb/s at best rather than gigabit upwards.

I'd advise using parted rather than gparted. Any time you need to do disk recovery it's not unlikely you won't be in a GUI. Anything gnome based may struggle on a pentium, and quite possibly simply not work due to the lack of SSE/SSE2.

If you *really* need to faff around with an MBR based disk, I'd recommend using OpenBSD's fdisk. It's not friendly, but it's possible to achieve things that aren't easily possible elsewhere, such as playing around with the protective MBR on a GPT disk (not something I recommend as a matter of course, but this is one way of sharing a disk between OS X on a hackintosh, and Windows/Unix. Windows and Linux see the same disk very differently)

It's not for messing with other systems' drives, just it's own. It's a DOS gaming machine (using a Windows 98 install), but I like to have a linux install for administration purposes. I like a GUI to keep it from feeling like work, but otherwise a usable desktop on this machine would just be a bonus.
It has a 2GB C: partition for Win98 spaghetti and 20GB D: for DOS stuff and anything reasonably static. The idea is that I'll be able to reimage C: or D: whenever needed, typically it would be C: getting reimaged whenever Win98 gets messed up, or if I want to change the hardware without leaving remnants of the old config behind.

The reason for wanting gParted is if I need to resize those partitions, but that shouldn't come up often so a boot disc would be okay.
Interesting comment about the protective MBR on GPT disks - I was thinking about something like that on a modern system that dual boots WinXP64 and Linux, but ended up going about it differently.

For the socket-7 DOS/Win9x box, dd imaging, transferring those images across the network, and importing files would be the main functions. Transferring images is slow - I was only getting about 3.5MB/sec, don't remember which direction the transfer was. That's with a P233 MMX, maybe it's normal for that slow of a CPU. I think it's acceptable for the convenience though, as I can just start a transfer and forget about it rather than messing with flash drives or moving hard drives around.

I recently installed CentOS 3.9 (which uses the 2.4 kernel) and the RAM footprint is way less than the 2.6 based distros (it looks like 128MB RAM would work fine with it). Not as low as DSL (which would work with 64MB) and it's not as fast as DSL either but it seems decent. On the downside I ran into a strange bug with the CentOS 3.9 install which apparently screwed up something in the MBR that DOS 7.1 is choking on, yet the full Win98 GUI is okay with. It's a weird bug that apparently mangles the C/H/S disk geometry info (unconfirmed for me), but appears fixable. Weird that such a mature release still had that bug because the reports I found about it were from years earlier.

yesterday I got in touch with DSL-Linux and all I can say is that this is by far the best linux I ever got my hands on!
I looks beautiful (fonts,icons, theme) and it runs superbe. Ram-usage about 40MB when started.

I always looked for a linux for my old pentium(mmx) / II/III machines and this seems fantastic for those machines!
As far as I read the faq it can be switched to a debian system so you can get all the fantastic packages from it.

Thanks for the tip! Years ago, I tinkered with Puppy Linux and BerryOS? Berry Linux?

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-08-24, 12:03:

yesterday I got in touch with DSL-Linux and all I can say is that this is by far the best linux I ever got my hands on! I looks […]
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yesterday I got in touch with DSL-Linux and all I can say is that this is by far the best linux I ever got my hands on!
I looks beautiful (fonts,icons, theme) and it runs superbe. Ram-usage about 40MB when started.

I always looked for a linux for my old pentium(mmx) / II/III machines and this seems fantastic for those machines!
As far as I read the faq it can be switched to a debian system so you can get all the fantastic packages from it.

IIRC the DSL Deb repo will be in achive statis. Has been in a long time so very old. Devuan Jessie got archived last year an will work fine on those system and no systemd.\

I've had in installed as low as Pentium 166mmx. (I've ran it on my P200mmx and K6-2 266 systems as well.) Then swapped the hdd it had to my AMD K6-2 400 system:

I'll have a look. Thx!

No worries. Here is a copy of my /etc/apt/sources.list file if you want to add stuff from the archive. Just the line without the # is all that is needed. Have fun....😉

sources.list

1deb http://archive.devuan.org/merged/ jessie main non-free contrib

thx, hopefully I will make this "devuan" look and feel like DSL, because it's fantastic.

Too bad "technoballZ" is not available for DSL and for "devuan" it's only amd64. I need x86/32Bit for P233MMZ/128MB 🙁

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-08-27, 09:54:

To bad "technoballZ" is not available for DSL and for "devuan" it's only amd64. I need x86/32Bit for P233MMZ/128MB 🙁

I was about to ask, what about antiX, but it looks like that needs at least 256 MB of ram. Or you could go the FreeDOS route, but again I am not the guy whom should ask.

You may well find that AntiX will install on 128megs of ran.You are not going to break anything giving it a shot.

Just tried antiX 19.4 and 17.4.1 on my AMD K6-2 400 rig with 256megs of ram. 19.4 kernal paniced after selecting any of the loading choices in the menu. antiX got a bit further showing the grey outline and globe, initialized the hdd etc then got an illegal instruction message after loading lightdm. It halted after that with caps lock and scroll lock leds on the keyboard flashing.

I downgraded to DSL 3.4.11 everything works right out of the box. Fast and best, no complaints.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-08-27, 21:54:

I downgraded to DSL 3.4.11 everything works right out of the box. Fast and best, no complaints.

Excellent.

Next thing, software software software.

For giggles I just burt a DSL 4.4.10 image from 2008 to cd-w. Then booted up on the AMD K6-2 400 system:

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-08-27, 21:58:

Next thing, software software software.

Here's the link to the Debian archives. I found could go up about two three Debian distros and gab stuff. Not recommended but who as long as it runs.

https://www.debian.org/distrib/archive

Have any of you considered Alpine Linux, by any chance? It's a very lightweight Linux distro mostly used in embedded applications and as the base image for Docker containers. It's very light on resource consumption. It even uses a lightweight C library other than GLIBC by default. It also forms the basis for PostmarketOS, a long term support OS for smartphones, based on an up-to-date mainline Linux kernel. I think it would form the ideal basis for a super lightweight Linux distro for older computers.

digger wrote on 2021-08-27, 22:30:

Have any of you considered Alpine Linux, by any chance? It's a very lightweight Linux distro mostly used in embedded applications and as the base image for Docker containers. It's very light on resource consumption. It even uses a lightweight C library other than GLIBC by default. It also forms the basis for PostmarketOS, a long term support OS for smartphones, based on an up-to-date mainline Linux kernel. I think it would form the ideal basis for a super lightweight Linux distro for older computers.

Sounds interesting. Thanks for mentioning it.

You're welcome. 🙂

By the way, the Linux kernel developers are looking for a maintainer for the CD-ROM code. Any takers here, by any chance? It's probably mostly legacy and vintage computer users who are still using this functionality.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_i … -ROM-Maintainer