I would suggest Slackware 15.0, since it is still on i586 officially. But I have to mention, the big issue in the web browsers is they force SSE2+ on when they can on the host machine that compiles the browser, and this is what is kind of wrong with distros these days that pretend to be lightweight. You may want to plan to recompile firefox in your effort to get a system running. Rumor has it that package at least is kind of screwed up in that regard and there may be a few others. I have no idea if any other distro really is tested on older machines. Few even bother with 32-bit anymore.

Another thing to mention is with that video hardware, even if the Xorg video driver is still provided, alot of them are broken with acceleration. So things like browsers will probably seem pretty slow.

Perhaps I could try running a Slackware on a similar machine to make sure.

PS The AMD K6-2 is a i586 class CPU

Yeah, you have right K6-2 is edge of i586. They were used simultaneously with PIII at the time and I always mixed them together.

I'm going to try Slackware 15 and Alpine but I'm sure that SSE2 will be an issue with those, not only because of the browser. My question is also what is last known distribution and version that is known to work w/o SSE2 and stable with that hardware for particular gropus I listed?

AOSC OS Retro

Eh, if you aren't going to recompile firefox, then my answer is Slackware 14.2, but then you can't use the latest Slackware firefox patch and you can't download and install firefox from mozilla because you will hit the same issue. This distro originally comes with firefox 45, which I think is before the change was made. I'm not sure why you'd want to use this version though? Personally, if I go back to using older distro versions, I'm probably not going to use a web browser on the web.

The reason why I am suggesting to try the recompile route is because I was able to compile out sse3 out of chromium, for example. I don't exactly think sse is necessary for any browser, but I need to see how it'd be done for firefox. But I can't exactly kid myself. I think rust uses sse too, so it might be tricky the steps that would be required. It would have to be tried.

Debian 7 will run well on all of the above, but i recommend at least 256 (512 is better) mbytes of ram if you want to do more than just looking at the desktop.
kernel will likely crash with sis6326, so use a modeset string which forces vesa vbe instead of the sis driver.
tridents will might be limited to 256 colors, even if it supports 16 bit

keenmaster486 wrote on 2022-10-27, 22:06:

AOSC OS Retro

This, tbh. More info if you’re interested..

https://wiki.aosc.io/aosc-os/retro/intro/

I went through this.

You list a lot of different hardware, I’m going to answer about pentium/k6/intel 430 mobo combos.

Try fedora 14
Debian jessie
Ubuntu 10?

There is one tonk likes, I haven’t tried yet. Magia?

Anyway, you need ones compiled for 586.

These modern ones will run very slow though.

You might consider a older distro from the early 2000’s like redhat or something.

More ram would help. It’s probably going to be non cached above 64mb but probably still better than using swap space.

A k6-3+ would also be a handy upgrade and would solve the caching issue.

A cyrix mII will open up a few more distros for socket 7 since it has cmov.

doogie wrote on 2022-10-28, 00:17:

keenmaster486 wrote on 2022-10-27, 22:06:

AOSC OS Retro

This, tbh. More info if you’re interested..

https://wiki.aosc.io/aosc-os/retro/intro/

From the site:

Extra packages, such as Firefox and more feature-complete desktop environments will be available from the community repository, however, hardware requirement checks will be enforced based on processor and memory installed on your AOSC OS/Retro device (i.e., package installation will be aborted when attempting to install Firefox on a computer without SSE2 SIMD support).

the3dfxdude wrote on 2022-10-27, 19:46:

PS The AMD K6-2 is a i586 class CPU

According to Linux anyway (CMOV). It's a strange paradox when a Cyrix 6x86 is more i686 than a magnitudes better CPU for the same socket while there's also the early 6x86 time when it was considered a 486 by most 1996-98 games/software. 😜

leileilol wrote on 2022-10-28, 02:51:

the3dfxdude wrote on 2022-10-27, 19:46:

PS The AMD K6-2 is a i586 class CPU

According to Linux anyway (CMOV). It's a strange paradox when a Cyrix 6x86 is more i686 than a magnitudes better CPU for the same socket while there's also the early 6x86 time when it was considered a 486 by most 1996-98 games/software. 😜

It's not a Linux thing, because it always could have supported k6-2, but what the distro makers decided to do. It's because no one uses the gcc flag of -march=k6-2 unless you go to gentoo or lfs and build the whole thing from scratch. I did once upon a time in 2001-2002. So it's entirely possibly to have a CMOV enhanced Cyrix distro that's still not "i686", or a 3dNow! Linux distro, etc. The distro makers only ever used over the years the i386 switch, i486, and now i586 or i686 ... or fake "i686" with sse2,3,4 ... blah blah blah turned on... for 32-bit. Yes most of these distros today that are 32-bit only are really meant for core2 and not actually i686! Blame firefox and a few other programs, because the distros did not flip on the flags themselves.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2022-10-28, 02:42:

doogie wrote on 2022-10-28, 00:17:

keenmaster486 wrote on 2022-10-27, 22:06:

AOSC OS Retro

This, tbh. More info if you’re interested..

https://wiki.aosc.io/aosc-os/retro/intro/

From the site:

Extra packages, such as Firefox and more feature-complete desktop environments will be available from the community repository, however, hardware requirement checks will be enforced based on processor and memory installed on your AOSC OS/Retro device (i.e., package installation will be aborted when attempting to install Firefox on a computer without SSE2 SIMD support).

Looks promising. This note about SSE2 is not a good information for sure. In general I need to run xorg with twm as window manager. From tools something like pdf reader, mpg123. In the area of video playing I do not expect to be able to do that with any modern video format. For instance I was able to play smooth mpeg1 on win98se with Pentium 120MHz and S3Trio64V+. In most cases I expect that the amount of RAM will be the bottleneck.

Any ideas for Non-SIMD Firefox replacement?

We need a vogons linux distro

Works on minimum 386 and 32mb of ram, comes with lots of benchmarks and emulators and can browse the web, etc

Think due to the low number of users and the lack of interest in old hardware or software by the Linux community and the web browser development for old machines is non-existent on Linux. NewMoon by roytam1, K-Meleon, etc could potentially be compiled for Linux but on such an old machine you'd still run into memory issues unless you are realistic about what sites to browse.
You can try a text based browser like Lynx or the last supported browser with a proxy and of course there's always vnc or rdp.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-28, 21:18:

We need a vogons linux distro

Works on minimum 386 and 32mb of ram, comes with lots of benchmarks and emulators and can browse the web, etc

What kind of emulators and web browsers do you expect to be able to run on a 386?

Not many I was only talking about a minimum requirement for the OS

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-28, 21:18:

We need a vogons linux distro

Works on minimum 386 and 32mb of ram, comes with lots of benchmarks and emulators and can browse the web, etc

I'm afraid that it is not possible anymore. i386 is dropped from Linux kernel for about 10 years? What is more, they are going to drop i486 as well: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wikUaRM5H_ … mail.gmail.com/

Maybe we could use a old kernel?

I would love a linux with built in emulation packages to emulate old machines and play games in on a modern system.
To share the nostalgia upon newer generations so they can live the moment.

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-29, 17:50:

Maybe we could use a old kernel?

I see i386 by debian maybe their kernel?
The latest distro needs minimum 586 to run 32bit, however.