Arch Linux on a 400 Mhz Pentium II! (feat. Minecraft) | WGEX 

First of all: thanks a bunch for trying Arch32 on a Pentium II, I have currently nothing older than a Pentium III without SSE and some AMD Duron to test it on. 🙂 Some comments: 8:00 Would love to know, what takes so long too. We just rebuild Arch32 from archiso from upstream. 8:40 Archinstall32 is alpha, might work, might not 13:40 GPG takes ages on old machines due to ever better crypto algorithms, which are proof of work, so to speak. If you ever tried to log in to a real 486 with a crypt instead md5 shadow entry, you can experience that too. :-) 18:35 Actually, you experienced the worst case, both signing keys expiring and no new ISO was out with the keys already fresh and updated on the ISO. 404 are possible if you have pacman databases not synched (or mirrors for that), pacman then loads from the old location 19:45 pacman-key --init and --refresh is only needed for Arch32 keys, but it is not mentioned anywhere :-) 21:30 Yes, that was exactly the case. archlinux32-keyring was stale and didn't contain the updated keys. 22:42 This is as upstream, two initrams are built using mkinitcpio, the really slow part is zstd, which assumes you have a 20 year old younger machine, so being only 20 times slower is actually a good thing. 25:30 ln -fs (for symbolic link), now you have a hard link (which is not bad and works) and timedatectl will probably overwrite that anyway 25:40 Well, install the editor of choice using pacstrap :-) 26:10 yes, same thing as on the ISOs, just do the "spiel" with keys again, becase it's not the same pacman keyring. installation is also possible with pacman --root=/mnt --config=/mnt/etc/pacman.conf nano from outside the chroot 28:30 grub-install i386 is merely meaning ix86. I remember vagely grub2 having trouble on i486 already (hence using an older syslinux for a real 486 is recommended). 30:10 upstream grub has 'silent' in /etc/grub/default, so you can change that and add any loglevel you like. On old machines this is a good idea, because you see what the thing is doing (and how slow actually systemd is). On new machines (especially with SSDs) this makes no sense and just slows down the boot process. 30:42 free invalid ptr on login (PAM systemd races), the only option is to uncomment sysetmd stuff from /etc/pam.d. You can comment out all lines with -*systemd in them and weird effects go away. This is something deep in some systemd modules on 32-bit going wrong. 31:30 There is automatic network on the ISO, but not for installation (pick networkd, netctl, systemd-network etc.). This is as upstream I think. 32:00 yes, we have to remove pam systemd modules from the ISO.. 33:00 maybe the umount was not unmounting /mnt correctly, when just rebooting? 37:30 again, crypto. it has to generate 3 (at least 3) sets of ssh host keys, so yeah. ssh-keygen is part of the first startup of the service (without any messages). Complain to upstream Arch.. :-) 38:00 sshd logins are slow, keys again. You can choose less secure and faster key algorithms in /etc/ssh/sshd_config, but then eventually your SSH clients will refuse to talk to your ssh server. 40:00 pacman -Ss openjdk (searches for packages) 42:40 we follow strictly upstream, so if wget is not part of 'base' then yes, so it is. :-) 43:10 Java on a pentium II cool, that's fast. Adding memory would speed up things greatly.. 56:00 yeah, key management is one weak point of mine :-) I hate gpg with a passion..

Pro Tip: If it says [Y/n], that means the capital 'Y' is the default and you only have to press Enter without typing 'y'. Similarly [y/N] means 'N' is the default option.

This channel has absolutely everything i love: cursed sysadmining, retro hardware, stupid anime jokes and insane amount of coziness, like talking IT shit with an old friend but with extra steps. I randomly stumbled upon this in incognito, while being up at 5am one day, waist deep in another late night research rabbit hole, and i'm extremely glad i did. This is absolutely a sub.

In the fstab, you should change "realtime" to "noatime". That'll make it boot faster.

I am OBSESSED with that cpuinfo readout. Reading that this CPU is vulnerable to Meltdown made me cackle. The bit where you forgot to install networking is as painful as it always is when I do it. Awesome content. I loved every cursed second of this!

There's something so satisfying about mixing new and old hardware/software! Also I loved the video and the humour :)

"this is the uwu senpai please install operating system for me nya command". New name confirmed. I will now use this forever. Also when you said "it's getting pounded, i wish that was me"... I felt that... me too.... me too...

I love that Dell case, its built like a tank, and it looks like it means business. I'm also getting some major Druaga1 vibes from this video.

You have exactly the sense of humor that is near and dear to my heart. Enjoyed the heck out of this, instant sub.

Cutiesnoopie can't hide her cuteness behind a popfilter X3

Old hardware + Linux troubleshooting content + Blahaj This is rad. Subbed.

Snoopie saying "okie dokie" is the cutest thing ever lmao 🥺

I loved everything about this video, keep doing this crazy stuff

I had an Intel P133 with an AMDK400 “Overdrive” cpu upgrade and a huge 64MB RAM. Was my first linux system on the original 133 mhz intel with Red Hat, bought on CD-ROM from Best Buy. 12 year old me managed to install it with Grub and not nuke our Windows 95 partition. Thank my grandpa teaching me about partitions on os/2. After the 400MHZ piggy back I daily drove, Gentoo and would constantly change global compiler flags and trying different kernels and optimisations as GCC was pumping out updates at that time. I use a mac now, but debian or similiar on raspberry pi’s and my NAS. Thank you for coming to my TEDx Talk.

First time I used Linux I took my main machine because I thought I knew a lot about computers, until I realized i only knew a lot about Windows and not computers in general. Yeah, I didn't mess it up but I was utterly lost at how I was gonna install anything

18:12 I think the reason this didn't work is just that your mirrorlist contained a mirror that was down. It said that a certain URL returned 404. It would also explain why it suddenly worked later, maybe it came back up?

"if you don't have a rack like me, wanna see my progress? no, you'll have to pay for that" LMAOOOOOOO

Giving minecraft more memory than you actually have can reduce performance as the GC won't be as active and things will start getting put on the disk, which is as slow as you expect Swap should only be used as RAM if you *need* it, otherwise avoid

The effort you put into these videos is amazing, i thought you'd have waay more subs than 4k

I really adore the way you make these videos, and your personality which one could say "swear a little much" even thought it makes the video 10 times more interesting

I'm alone on a Wednesday night watching someone else install an operating system.

Please keep the retro hardware with modern OS content going! I really wanna see how hard you can push some of these systems as a daily driver. If you wanna do some "newer" hardware, maybe try to run some games in lutris (think a first gen i5 with an old HD 7970 gpu (they actually have vulkan/dx12 support!)

That is a great "project", I am amazed on how some technologies are still capable of being completely usable on older hardware, this channel is extremely underrated. The amount of work and research put in this vid is not comparable to the amount of subs the channel has. This inspired me to launch a minecraft server on Toshiba Satellite using gentoo, my gawd

You're absolutely unhinged and I mean that as a compliment. :D Thanks for the fun video! :)

not even done watching this video but i can already tell this is my new favorite channel

The part where you actually played on the server really brought back memories of me playing and hosting at the same time on my AMD Athlon X2 4200+. It was fine for older games or just for the teamspeak server, but Minecraft really brought that computer to its knees. No other friend had the initiative to do this, all of them had better pcs than I did xD.

This video has big Druaga1 vibes and I love that so much. I need more of that energy in tech videos. Honestly your content is so great!!

It’s just satisfying watching these sorts of videos.

This was a fun watch. Enjoying every second of slowness lol.

hi snooooopppppiiiiieeee :3 very cool video I like it a lot there's a lot of cutiesnoopie noises my heart is gonna melt

1:28 Not gonna lie, the video bump was so cool! It was awesome! The part 1:34 went like a really cool TV show jingle. THIS IS AWESOME!!! 😃😎

11:31 I would agree. I have a Pentium 233 system with windows 98 and watching it do things like draw the windows or waiting for it to do something is very satisfying.

Wow, I have that exact same Dell PowerEdge 1300! I have acquired it from my grandparents as it was used as their server. I have installed Windows Server 2003 on mine and it runs great! These Dell servers were beasts.

This was enjoyable to watch :D

this video is pure chaos... and I'm here for it!

i love this sort of stuff so much

just amazing as always

your channel has absolute fediverse energy nya

didnt watch the video yet but I already can tell that it's gonna be legendary tier content

Whoa, didn't know you could do that, Snoopie. You're so smart! 😉😍 I use arch, BTW.

I wonder what would happen if you disabled CPU mitigations. I wonder how much of a performance gain that would bring.

the sheer fact that Minecraft 1.12.2 ran at all... amazing work Snoopie :3

Your channel always gives me a burning desire to install Linux on random shit at 2am, thanks for posting :)

great video bro

22:42, Linux kernel 6.1 on a machine that predates winXP. Gotta love Linux

Love your videos they are video entertaining for a fellow linux nerd ^-^

i'm lucky to watch this masterpiece so much helpful

I too have been putting Arch Linux on an old Dell workstation. I feel so giddy that someone else got this bug in their head around the same time. My maker space received a Dell Precision 670 with 2 GB of DDR2 ECC registered RAM, dual Xeons of the 2006 era, and an odd combination of IDE, SCSI, and early SATA ports. Someone had installed Debian on an IDE hard drive. Changing its root password still left us with an old drive being slow. I plugged in an SSD and walked through Arch's steps. ...slogged through them. ...revised them. ...made shell scripts to automate them ever so slightly. I went through the keyring sludge, too. I should turn this into a video. Thank you so much!

i fuking love you're starts man epic its like im back in the early 90's or early stages of yt before google takeover lov it

I once installed Debian 11 x86 on a 400MHz Pentium II tower, though it's much less cooler than yours. It does have a 64MB Radeon 7000, a SB Live 5.1, an SD card as a boot drive, and 512MB RAM in it, so it's got something going for it :P Unbelievably it worked first try. Even without firmware for the GPU it dropped into a desktop without any faff. Slow as balls but it was almost usable :P

I love this channel so much

In the future, I'd recommend using cfdisk to format the drive as it's interactive.

This Cabinet cool af now I want one :)

Interesting, like!

I am subscribed to your channel. Your videos are good.

"free(): invalid pointer" is hillarious and disturbing at the same time error that ever could your login prompt print out, especially when it works after trying several times for no obvious reason)))

Snoopie is real cute.. But like- Why? Just- Why? Why not use it on your main system? It's going to run MUCH better trust me.

All fun till you realize its power consumption XD What a nice video, keep it going!

this channel is extremely underrated

Oh no, I have wandered to the Arch community in me search for making my P4 systems work.

This was shockingly entertaining

hi there thank you for the great video but wanted to put my 2 cents in. ty for the amazing video.

Incredible

hehehe, new sub from yt recommended, your welcome!

very awesome and also cool :D

So... I looked, and I can't find any mention of multithread support for PaperMC (though their Folia project does). How did you see such an improvement after adding a second processor?

cool stuff

That case is so horrible and complicated. I LOVE IT, i want one.

So, it turns out I installed archlinux32 for the first time in my life almost exactly at the same time as you! And I ran into the same keyring issue, though it wasn't as extreme ('pacman-key --populate archlinux32' fixed all the issues).

I found an old toshiba satellite with a core duo II. It was a windows 7 laptop. Someone had done some work to it as it had 4gb RAM to my surprise. I had used linux for a little over a year at that point maybe? I decided to install vanilla arch for the first time and build my desktop with i3. Best decision ever. I learned more about linux and computers from that one project than i did in the previous year. I had tokjeep it lightweight, yet i was able to rice it out to a beautiful UI. I still grab this laptop almost every weekend. Use it for coding practice

thats why when bootstrapping, i add "nano" after all the "base linux linux-firmware" voodoo.

Yes, I am indeed watching this at midnight

16:50 i ran into this problem yesterday and i spent lots of time reasrching until i found you dude

my god i love this

My first real Linux install (10 yrs ago at this point) was Arch and after my primary P4 2.2 I also installed it on my 550MHz laptop. It wasn't too terrible. Before seeing this I was thinking of picking up the higher end PE 2600 version of this server and see what I can do with it, which yes would include Minecraft. But none of this cheating by only running a server, I'm talking about the whole client as well. I managed over 20fps on a PIII 450 with 256 megs of RAM so it should work out great, right? Maybe I could even manage RU-vid.

Joey Ramone and Linux. It doesn't get better than this!

Interesting !

This video's existance made me change my mind about having EndeavourOS which is basically Arch's equivalent of Pop!_OS and swtich to real pop!_os because pain

isn't the "free() : invalid pointer" a memory allocation-related issue? its not specific to old cpus

that hard drive bay is so awesome B)

`free -h` loads a whole free ELF image into memory... the most lightweight way to measure memory usage would be to have a `cat` alternative without switches and dump contents of `/proc/meminfo` onto the screen... that's a whole 1 read syscall, 1 write syscall and 1 exit syscall. probably could do so in like 200 bytes of raw x86 asm incl headers

FYI you shouldn't be missing ram. The ATI Rage ii usually has 2 mb of ram on those servers. The missing 40mb of ram is likely something malfunctioning. EDIT: I would try using openj9 too.

ive been using linux on raspberry pi for a few weeks now and its fun

This kinda reminds me of my first server, a 300MHz Pentium II laptop (Compaq Armada) with a busted screen. Ran Ubuntu (I think starting on 9.10 and eventually moving to 10.04) for a while before I decided I wanted to try out FreeBSD. Only had 128MB of RAM in that thing which was painful even for a lightweight server back in 2010. I remember upon suggestion from a friend I set up a folding@home instance on that thing, and I'm sure the sheer power of the P2 was very helpful for that project. Pretty wild that Arch doesn't even have vi installed in the base system. I guess it's not the biggest deal since you can just grab an editor through pacstrap though I'd expect the "base" metapackage to be a bit less bare than it actually is. Also, maybe you've figured this out since this video, but for quicker shell navigation, you can use ctrl-W (^W) to delete entire words (analogous to ctrl-backspace) instead of holding backspace, ^A to move to the very start of the line, ^E to move to the end of the line, and ^D is a quick alternative to having to type "exit". ^R is also an essential shell technique that ime not enough people know about, allows you to search command history and it automatically brings up the latest command that matches the characters you type. Coupled with a million lines of command history I can quickly call up commands from months or even years ago. I guess I do use the shell a *lot* but it's hugely beneficial when there are long commands that I have to execute on a regular basis.

Btw, you don't need Putty anymore on windows. Both of the shells now have ssh installed by default. Standard command is "ssh user@host", just as it should be.

what did you do and how long did it take to accure so much knowledge on linux and associated hardwares?

this is literally a channel I’ve been looking for a while; old tech, a trans woman AND silly euphemisms and one-liners? amazing also that fucking drive cage is the pinnacle of convenience, why isn’t it in modern cases??

Lol. I saw that case and thought “I have two of those!” But turns out, yours is newer. Mine are just PowerEdge 300s. 😮

This is the coolest, unecessairily heavy, overengineered pc block.

We need the Gentoo build done on this one, see if you can beat my Rust compile time :D

I tried to install arch on an Toshiba Satellite A70 sometime ago and it just refused to boot lol, maybe it had something to do with the system having only 192MB ram

When I saw what your pacstrap command was, i was just waiting for the moment when you realized that you don't have an editor. They were taken out of base about 2 years ago I think. 🙂 EDIT: Side note... you seem like Druaga1 with how you do things.

impressive very nice

i will use this as a tutorial thank you

why does everyone that use linux save and exit on nano using ctrl+x y enter, instead of just ctrl+s ctrl+x instead?

Why is so satisfying to see someone struggle XD

may I suggest whenever trying to edit files on a bare bones system you use "vi", it is fairly standard it is vim, but lacks the stuff we like, though it does the job.

you changed the default SigLevel = Required DatabaseOptional to SigLevel = Required TrustedOnly, which is why you had to do that, I think. since it was complaining about not finding database signatures

Love the Pentium II

Subscribed, though if you see this, I am curious… Are you in any way inspired by another “old tech” RU-vidr by the name of “Druaga1”? Your content reminds me a lot of his. Edit a few hours later: After a binge session of your videos (as I used to do with his) I have found many other people in your comments that think the same. Enjoying your videos a lot so far, please keep making amazing content :) (unlike a certain someone)