I just read an article in a year old issue of Popular Science I had laying around the house. The article talked about bringing life to old retired hardware. They suggested using Linux on older Pentium machines, 486s and even 386s in order to revive an old and/or discarded computer. The article made me curious. I was wondering if anyone in this forum has had success installing Slack on an old PC.

I had a 486 (AMD 5x86 [133mhz] overdrive CPU) with 36MB of RAM that I tossed into a dumpster a few years ago. I wonder if I had saved it if I could turn it into a useful machine for some simple computing. I know there are several lightweight window managers, but I wonder if it would be possible to create a simple and fast desktop environment.

Do share!

well, I have a 486 intel CPU with 92 of RAM, as my Web Server, with PHP, MYSQL, APACHE, just for web desing, I have a dual boot with Debian and FreeBSD, and it works really great. I really find my 486 usefull thanks to *nix.
when you got an older PC, there's a lot of Window managers for slow computers, but I dont even think of my 486 for a graphic desktop. (but there's must be a lot of alternatives on linux)

Yes, you can successfully install Linux, especially Slack, on old PC's but you need to realistic about how "fast" it will be. If you are running a Pentium or less, with 64Mg of RAM or less, you can press one of these machines into service as a firewall or lightweight server, but if you expect to be using it for your desktop I think you will quickly abandon the notion.

By way of illustration, at my office a few months ago, the company downstairs was upgrading their PC's and was literally tossing the old machines into the dumpster. I hustled downstairs and snagged a pair; they were HP Pentium II's. One had 64Mg and an 8G drive, the other had 96Mg with a 10 G drive. No video card or NIC, but after a little rummaging through my box of spare parts I had 2 "new for me" PC's up and running. I set one up with Slack and the other one with a short-lived fling with Fedora, but after the initial thrill wore off in a couple of days, I realized that the extra fans were really making my room noisy; I was spending money on electricity for no real purpose; and finally, I already had a much higher powered rig that exceeds all of my computer needs. So I powered them down and put the cases in the closet. I pulled the 10G drive and I'm using it as a backup drive in another machine, which is a nice little bonus, but to be honest once you get used to using a modern machine with giant drives, plenty of RAM, and a lot of goodies like CD-RW's, those old Pentiums and 486's just don't cut it anymore.

By way of comparison, I would say it's sort of like going back to watching VHS videotapes after you've been accustomed to watching movies on DVD's for a year or two. Sure, the videotape is still usable, but man, it's nowhere near as good as the DVD, and what do you mean I don't have subtitles, or extra scenes along with the director's comments, and you're telling me I need to remember to rewind the tape when I'm done watching it? Sheesh! How primitive! It may not be the greatest analogy, but hopefully you see my point.

Anyway, I'd suggest always holding on to the salvagable components of a PC, and it's definitely useful having a spare box that you can experiment on, but at least for me, trying to keep the old machines going sounds cooler than it actually is. I'm not trying to discourage anyone; I'm just trying to keep things realistic. Older machines definitely can still be useful, but the older they are the few options I think you'd have to deploy them. Just my 2 cents -- J.W.

See www.amigolinux.org for a great Slackware9.1-compatible starter system of about 200MB with light weight wm and browser, editor and other stuff. There also several 'miniature' Slackish distros and HOWTO's for minimal installation and old-hardware.

I've owned 2 old Apple Mac computers, 1 was a Mac SE (my parents gave away.....DOH!) and 1 is a tricked out Mac Color Classic, that I still own. Each of these machines ran a very well designed and full functional window environment (OS 6 and OS 7). I used the SE as my ONLY desktop system when my 486 computer that I was building at the time, had a motherboard that died. The SE had MS Word and other typical desktop applications. I even had a nice music notation program that I used.

Those Mac machines had SLOW CPUs, very little RAM and a TINY hard drive. Even with all of those limited resources I had a functioning desktop OS. Granted, neither machine was capable of navigating the internet with a modern graphical browser. But as far as basic desktop computing, those Mac computers were years ahead of their time.

I would like to know why we don't see anything from the Open Source/Linux world that is lightweight and capable of being used on machines with similar specs. I know that Windows 95, although riddled with daily crashes, was a desktop OS that ran on 486s and was capable of surfing the net.

Two years ago, I got a stack of nearly pristine 486SX 33MHz boxes that had been used in a department store's MSDOS based POS system. They were free, so I took them and used them. They only had 4 MB RAM, so I sacrificed half of them to pull the 1 MB 30 pin simms and fill all 8 slots on the other half.

I still have several sitting on the shelf and use them as needed for "ad hoc" server deployments. And that is where they shine: as servers, not as workstations.

Now, before you fall over with laughter, just remember that most servers don't need much in the way of machine resources. For every server in the world that causes a quad Xeon to thrash, there are hundreds that work fine with ancient hardware.

Slackware's installer no longer supports less than 16 MB RAM, so the most practical way to install Slackware on them is to pop a hard drive into another machine (in my case, my own administrative workstation) for the install, and then move it to the old, low memory box. Few of these older machines will boot from large hard drives, but booting from a floppy isn't a problem when the only time they are rebooted is when a power outage exceeds the UPS's battery life.

Using Slackware 9.0, 9.1 and recently, 10.0, some of the practical uses I have found for these old "thrashers:"

1. DNS server.

2. Firewall/router.

3. Satellite mail server (using Sendmail, fetchmail, and pop3).

4. NFS server (inhouse software repository, including the entire Slackware distribution for convenient network installs).

5. Password protected download server for a small number of customers.

6. Web server (static html only).

7. Openssh server behind NAT firewall for offsite remote (emergency) administrative access to the LAN.

Now obviously, you have to use some common sense. These old machines are not suited to run a discussion forum for hundreds of users. And you aren't going to use one as the file server for your LAN. But if you have a T1 or less, they can serve all the static html your pipe wants to handle.

I have also found that these boxes aren't really well suited as print servers any longer (for me) after converting to CUPS and gimp-print drivers, and since most inexpensive printers don't have any memory these days. (And, about half of them are USB only.) Still, ifall you need is an LPRng/Apsfilter print server for an old laser printer, they will work.

Also, reliability is an issue. But then, common sense comes into play again. A very clean 486SX, built from quality components, may prove less likely to fail than a new, cheaply built machine from a discount house.

A lot of people don't like this approach, and prefer to run all their servers on one new, powerful, box. But just think about DNS: three 486SX DNS servers means DNS is more likely to be up 24/7 than if it is running on one of anything.

Another thing to think about is security. If you want to permit a handful of customers access to something, do you really want to run a web server on the machine that runs your company's data base, or the accounting server? Set up a dedicated 486SX and port forward to it, and if the black hats do manage to get in, it is less likely to ruin your entire month.

Of course, there are other considerations in other settings. You can't go buy a new $15.00 PCI 100BaseT NIC and stuff it into an old ISA only box. Consolidation of all services on one machine takes less physical space.

I will say, though, that most of the time when people flatly reject this older hardware as worthless, it is because they have never tried to use it for any of these purposes. And whether you are talking about using them in a small business setting, or at home, if you have the space and the inclination, you will find that it doesn't really add to administrative workload to take care of several machines instead of one -- because Slackware servers don't demand much administrative intervention.

All this talk of "turn it into a server" is good for those who need servers, but...

Most of us need a usable Desktop machine. This is a story of one.

My system: (Old by my standards)
Pentium II 300Mhz,
300+Mb RAM (SDRAM 66Mhz)
2x4Gig HD's
Intel 440 chipset
nVidia Riva 128 (pre TNT card) 4Mb cache video card
Slackware 10, KDE 3.2

My Performance:
WOW! I have seen WindowsXP choke on 800Mhz cpu's, but watch this Slack10/2.6.7 Kernel/3.2 KDE run! I do office, email, newsgroups, some gimp-ing, listen to mp3 radio streams.

(to be honest, windows 2000 would be also at home on this machine)

There is an AthlonXP 2000+, 1Gig Ram, Radeon 8500, Windows XP box sitting right next to the slackware, and I often hesitate to turn it on, I miss very little.

Notes:
1. I didn't say KDE so many times for no reason. GTK based software on my machine is 2 times slower than QT-based, for example
- FireFox, ThunderBird are painfully slow (and thx to GTK, ugly despite all the better themes) (Y do you need them anyway? Konqeror, Kmail and Knode - Woot! Woot!)
2. The key with old machines is not CPU, its MEMORY - most important thing to max out.
3. Almost forget about watching/decoding DVDs/Divx/Xvid or other heavily compressed video streams.

I installed Slack 8.1 on a 386/33MHz with 8MB RAM. No problems at all. And I don't think that Slack has changed much from 8.1 to 10.0 (regarding performance on older machines). All you have to do is use the "lowmem" bootdisk instead of the standard "bare" bootdisk.

And an old 386 or 486 can easily serve as a dhcp or print server, or a small FTP, for example. Pentiums too, of course. I still consider everything above 100MHz as "fast".

I've run slack-9.1 and win2k on a dualboot 233 Mhz box with about 380 Mb RAM. Speed was reasonable and slack certainly quicker than a standard install of mdk.

I just built a new system with slack 10 on a 350 mgz amd, 200 mb ram and a 8 gig hd, using dillo web browser, I can browse just as fast as my regular system in my sig.

My wife's laptop is the most elderly PC we have (IBM Thinpad PII-266MHz, 256MB RAM, 20GB HD, Neomagic video/audio/modem card). Fedora ran decent on there, but it was still pretty sluggish. Slack 10 with KDE has been like supercharging that machine. My wife tried the machine out after I did the install and she couldn't believe the speed.

Does anyone here have a favorite "custom" desktop theme that they like that is lightweight and fast? For example, I ran across the following desktop setup on LinuxCult.

http://linuxcult.com/gallery/entry.s...02#comment8874

This setup stuck me as having the potentional to be fairly snappy on older machines. It is using a light wm, rox as a desktop and a lightweight panel program. Since my Slack/KDE machines are doing VERY well, I decided not to experiment.

Now, I am sure there are plenty of cheap PII 200, 233 and 266s with 32-64MB of RAM out there. I wonder if they could be setup as desktop machines for internet access, word processing, email, etc with a lightweight or custom desktop setup.

I run slackware 9.1 on a K5. Hosts my webpage

As pointed out above "older" boxes make great little servers for small home/homeoffice/small biz servers. Many a good machines have been sent to the landfills by big biz upgrades. These "considered trash" machines (P-PRO, MMX, II and Celeron) class machines have lots of life left in them. If you keep up with Tech in the industrial electronics as well as firewall devices you will notice many PII and < processor powered devices.
These machines also make great experiment machines for "equipment hacks" and testing "cluster networks". As an example my small yet powerful Beowulf class home cluster is made up of such machines. This machine here is yet another example, a $5 mobo (asus ovrclker special) and $5 PII 450mhz with new 133mhz ram, a $10 20gig hd, a freebee 6gig hd, new GeForce 400 and soundblaster 4.1 card tweaked to a modest 517mhz speed.
One of my "home" servers running routeing/firewall/gateway/nfs/mail/samba is a hack of several different "tossed" boxes running at @333mhz PII. Monitoring the cpu usage of this server and running multi-computers accessing it shows that the processes and cpu time hardly even blink. That proves that even "slow" processors can be used on modest sized servers with several users.

These "slower" machines can server as embeds in home automation, industrial processes, home robotic experiments, workshop equipment controls, PLCs, let your imagination go....
As an Engineer in the Electro-Mechanical field I am always looking for usages for these "old" boxes. Several at my company have already found new life after the office on the production floor and since as of this past week (designated corp network sysadmin) I have more machines to salvage.

So grab up some "old" boxes and have funn!!!!

I run Slackware 10 on an old laptop: Pentium 'classic' 120MHz, 40MB RAM, 2GB HD, TFT display with a maximum of 800x600 dpi^2 at 8 bits per pixel or 640x480 at 16bits..

Slack is perfect on that baby. 8-)))

I only had to make a sensible choice for the window manager. It's Fluxbox now.
I didn't know Fluxbox, before, and tried to use FVWM and Window Maker (which I like pretty much). Unfortunately, these two run into the infamous X window colour management trouble problem. With Fluxbox the root window colour, too, changes, when I open up another window, but it changes to another *acceptable* colour, not something crazy, that just makes you want to run away from your desktop.

Oroborus and Openbox 3 should be good choices, too, but they are not part of the standard Slackware distribution. So it's Fluxbox now, and it works very well.

BTW, I typically use this laptop just as a terminal for my server. It gives me the chance to sit on my balkony, and work with programs that actually run on my server. ssh -X is such a great relief, sometimes! 8-) I have the speed of my server at hand, but don't have to be indoor. 8-) So old hardware be quite useful!

gargamel