Running Linux on a 20 Year Old Computer 

I ran linux on a 1995 computer. In 1995 though. Slightly different proposition back then.

Do what I do with WiFi, stick your android in via USB and connect the android to WiFi and go to usb tether and your android will act as a ethernet cable. Works for me everytime.

Stick AntiX on it, IceWM will tick over at about 60Mb of RAM and it CENI will sort your wifi dongle no problem.

What a blast from the past! Tiny used to be on the high street. You walked into the shop, bought your computer and if I remember correctly they delivered it a week or two later. I still have my receipt for the one and only time I used this long forgotten company. They would rip you off on big interest on instalments payments though that's probably why they went bye bye because once you got stung once you never went back...

I have several Pentium 2 and 3 laptops. Tiny core would certainly not be my first choice. I would suggest trying Slitaz. I use Sliltaz 3 on the Pentium 2 machine and the 'rolling' version on the P 3. It's perfect old hardware and excellent for such a small download (under 50mb). As with previous comments, Antix is worth a look too although I find Slitaz preferable.

My mother has an ancient HP computer, and several years ago I was able to install Ubunyu 12.04 on it. By the way, it's still working. Only that now it runs Windows 7.

Hope you can do un updated video on this because it would be interesting to see how this works - given so much advice and encouragement by others.

I remember using Linux 20 years ago... Mandrake. Happy days

I had an (I think a 2001) IBM laptop that was a Pentium 2 and it ran Puppy very well. It came with XP on it and was full of malware. A few years ago I gave it to an IT friend of mine because he had a client who had that very same laptop operating a dedicated medical device with very old custom software that did not behave on newer machines. They appreciated the back up machine. At times, there is a purpose for these old machines!

NDISWrapper would allow for 32bit rj45 and wifi drivers from vista (which would work on win7 and win8.1) and also drivers for serial (like probably your 56k modem and the rs232 port or SCSI) and sometimes usb for bluetooth. A simple (e.g. dynamode) usb to ethernet dongle (which even though it is usb2 for 100mbps would work in usb1 but at 12mbps) would work. For the era, I think installing another 256meg SDRAM (running probbaly at 100MHZ FSB, although 133MHZ FSB would do) is worth it. Crucial or Corsair or Kingston would do. You could actually maybe put four 256meg modules in there for a gig, but if unsure, you could get a 256meg and two 128meg modules because you have two 128meg in there. At the time 512meg was totally an acceptable amount of RAM and not overkill for a pentium3. Find the _"FCC ID"_ (federal communications code) written between the PCI slots to uniquely identify the mainboard and thereby better source information on it. You could have taken an image of the HDD first so as to retain the mainboard drivers for win98se. Getting the RAM is the way forward. Then you might even try knoppix which can install to HDD or usb-pendrive or SDcard and can use fat32 (automatically) as a swap partition. Rather than an ethenet card, a usb2.0 card would be more worthy. If you remove the 56k modem, you have just enough IRQ bandwidth to run the usb2.0 (four port) PCI card and that TVCard (probably a Hauppauge bt878 brooktree which btw knoppix and mandrake/mandriva/manjaro recognise immediately like ubuntu) and the Nvidia. I know from experience. Then of course you can plug all manner of rj45 or wifi dongles into the usb2.0 card as its bandwidth will accomodate them without affecting the TV card or GPU further. You could, if you really wanted to, disable the com2 RS232 port (and maybe ieee1284 parallel), but I doubt you'd need to. You can check for IRQ conflicts in win98 or winxp device manager. The jingle for Tiny PC on the TV-Advert was _"Think big about your PC. Think Tiny."_ They competed with _"Time"_ computers whose advert said _"Come to Time, where time is on your side."_ An alternative to the dynamode usb to ethernet (of the same shape) is made by xenta and is quickfind item code 288747 on ebuyer at £1.98 so I suggest maybe getting a bucket load. However, the £5 dynamode _"USB-NIC-1427-100"_ (e.g. ebay or aliexpress) is a sure bet IMO because, on account of it supporting WinXP, it even works on old Slackware (notorious for poor hardware driver support) from the early millenium of say 2004, and sometimes older. PuppyLinux Slackware has a install wizard for extra software. p.s. Keep the floppy drive in their and the CDROM in there so you can use both "Hirens Boot CD" and "plop linux" oh and "Ultimate Boot CD" (with the floppy if you need to piggyback boot) and then piggyback boot to a usb or usb2 port. Had you saved the win98 drivers, you have been able to use them in a PE boot CD (old HirensPE, BartPE or otherwise). If you use a network card (e.g. usb or PCI or PCMCIA conerted to PCI) for rj45, you can network boot via PXE so see this watch link video using a similar era HP computer doing so. Search youtube for this to find the 10March2014 video on the Kris Occhipinti channel: 9LT8mGhOSm4 Video Title: _"Boot Linux With a Floppy Disk and gPXE Over a Local Network"_ His video explains how to have the right ethernet drivers on the floppy for booting. It is tinycore btw.

Cool video, I've tried to do the same with old machines, with some successes.

I'm still using an old laptop of mine from the year 2002 as a Debian server (Intel Mobile Pentium III 800 ULV, which funnily is automatically clocked by Linux to 900 MHz on load). It runs Debian since 2012 and I recently updated it to the most current Debian version a few weeks ago. Of course it's just booting into the console. It serves CalDAV & CardDAV using Radicale and an in-house OSCAM server.

Great video as always. I am running SolydX on my Inspiron 1720 laptop from 2007. Still running strong as my main and only machine. Don't see reason for upgrading.Greetings from York.

I actually got ahold of a Dell Dimension 4100 a few weeks ago and it pretty much has almost the exact same specs and hardware as your PC. I tried Tiny Core first and hated it. I ended up putting Puppy Linux on there and it runs beautifully.

@Quids - *Love It!* I still say (as I posted in another comment when you showed you received this; was on Twitter I think) that I would be a dedicated viewer of a new playlist or theme of retro computer videos. Going over the hardware. Original OS. And I think it would be incredibly interesting & fun to install retro period-correct versions of Linux on them. That's just IMHO; I'm a dedicated viewer on your channel anyway, but I'd like to see where you go with this. *One of my other favorite channels on RU-vid is Druaga1* - Funny as hell, about 90k subs, and he does tons of stuff with old hardware, with Apple/MacOS, Microsoft/Windows, AND he does Linux stuff too in fun ways. Installing Kubuntu 12 on a G5... or 2006 Mac Pro. Maybe check out a few of his vids. Funny enough literally after I finished mentioning Druaga1, you cut to the video camera view pointing at the monitor, which is very Druaga1-esq LOL! Keep these videos coming man! So Fun!!! *AND DON'T BE AFRAID TO SHOW THE FAILURES and make longer videos once in a while.* Some of your fans may like that (myself included) because showing the issues is part of the journey and can be quite funny. This was only 9-ish minutes, but I think you could have gotten a 30 minute video out of it with more of the camera pointing at the monitor/PC angle. Cheers! -H.B.

Yes floppies work, i was given a 5.25" in the last week and asked to copy/get a directory off the old backup disk. No x86_64 machine had a floppy drive (no usb 5.25 either) so used an [old] Lubuntu 19.04 x86 (alpha).... The dropping of the kernel code for floppies has been announced, but no date or release yet.

I aquired the exact same pc about 10 years ago, i replaced the cpu to an 800mhz p3 and maxed out the memory to 512mb if I remember correctly with a sound card upgrade, USB pci card and i added a dvd burner and put everything into a brand new case, it was running windows 98 but I replaced that with xp home edition, it worked really well but I ended up giving it away to a friend that needed one, it lasted a while after all the upgrades

I need that Y2K safe sticker 😅

Support for machines that old is problematic due to well removal of drivers that support them.

These videos I've seen with "Can you run linux on this year old cmputer?" The answer is generally yes unless it's something /truly/ obscure. But the other question of "Will it run at a decent enough level you'd /actually/ be willing to use it regularly?" The answer past a certain age is going to be no because they just won't have the specs to really do anything worth-wild in a snappy manner unless your needs are /very/ basic or you have the patience of a saint.

man those fans spinning I forgot the sound since I moved to a fanless broadwell lol

In the 90s, I've installed a text based Linux on a PC XT just to play music for our telephone exchange system. They use tape player before but it breaks down after just a month. The computer so old but surprised Linux run without problems on it. After install, I just run the program to play the music and unplugged the monitor. It ran for months until the technician unplugged the computer to repair our telephone system.

What you have there is a pretty early Pentium III. It's the second variant in the "Katmai" line of PIII processors, which included the PIII 450 and 500. You also got other variants in the "Coppermine" and "Coppermine-T" series which had speeds ranging from 550, 600, 800 and 1.00GHz, then later on in around 2001, they released the "Tualitine" architecture which had chips ranging from 1.0 to 1.4GHz. I personally used to have a PIII 550 on a VIA Slot 2 board (I don't recall exactly what model) with 512MB of SDRAM and a RAGE128 Pro GPU. That thing ran windows 2000 like an absolute champ.

Nothing like always keeping a old NIC :)

When I was running Linux back then, I was using a combination of Red Hat, Caldera, and then Suse Linux. I was rolling my own kernels as I was doing X11 Matrox driver, pnm2ppa and reiserfs development on my dual PPro 200 (about the speed of your PIII/500 Mhz) and my DEC pc164 motherboard as I was into early 64 bit development and porting. If you go back to using window managers of that time, such as GNUstep (what I was using), enlightenment, or fvwm, you'll be fine. For wifi drivers, you'll need a mix of a more modern distro/kernel with USB support and loadable drivers to get going. The RAM hog is going to be the WM, not the distro itself. However, nothing beats a cheap Intel 10/100 PCI card for compatibility. I'm sure you'll find one for next to nothing on fleabay or similar.

1. Slitaz 2. antiX 3. Puppy 4. Any distro w/ any Window Manager

Linux on Pentium III is no big deal. Now Linux on Pentium II...that's cool. Linux on Pentium 1...my hat is off to you. I've got a small collection of Linux CD's from 20 years ago that work better on old computers than do NEWER versions of Linux.

I got tiny core successfully running on my 97 packard bell. No way to connect internet to it yet. I really want to though, because the thought of that computer using the internet again in 2020 blows my mind.

Should just use a late 90s version of Linux, with a compact flash drive it'll run faster than most Windows 10 machines do. Just like they did back in the 90s.

Riva TNT2 cards were really good back then.

Pentium 3 is a very powerful processor!

20yrs+ ago i was already using Mandriva linux, and most pc back then are P3..

I used to run Linux on a Pentium 1.

Fantastic video! Please do revisit this! I love Linux, but I do wish I had a PC like this to play some Windows 98 games! I used to have a Pentium II Compaq Presario, but I don’t have it anymore.

Please follow this up Quids!

I remember Tandy PC's.

8:18 Windows 7 can still read floppy drives as well. My desktop PC has a floppy drive and Win7. Not sure if windows 10 still supports it but I expect both linux and Windows will remove support soon, as they are so rare now.

You can get the list of usb devices without lsusb by checking in /sys/bus/usb, and each entry will have an idVendor and idProduct file that has the hex vendor and product IDs and a product field which describes what kind of device it may be. Otherwise you can just reference a USB IDs database.

Now this is what ive been looking for

Thank you, Q. Very interestingh.

what do you think about puppy linux?

Linux? Can run on ANYTHING!....(except a treadmill!....hahahaha!)

My 20 year old PC runs Tarh Pup like a boss. On the other hand, my 20 year old laptop can barely boot up with the anything bigger than 200Mb 😂

The laptop I found is a 486... now that’s old

Try adding more RAM, fresh thermal paste and use the Trinity desktop environmet

I think those are serial and parallel ports used for mouse and printer if I remember correctly. And it is not many choices for a 32bits distro today 🤔

Oh, such a nice ISA slot FreeDOS Sound Card Game Machine! and a nice pci aureal vortex2 .. or dosbox it.

cool, so what will you use it for? regular file browsing or classic old games for the old folks? web browsing? youtube? office?

Linux does keep hardware out of the dump unlike Windows which wastes so much hardware. Understand to do what daily non gaming users do, we've gone way beyond that.

You could run USB tethering and run it via usb

I am sure Miss Quids will get that running easily. :-p

Linux on a 20 year old computer? I run the latest FreeBSD on a 17 year old computer 2003 Pentium 4 HT and motherboard from a HP D510 SFF Case: Compaq EVO with Windows 2000/98SE sticker. FreeBSD 12.1p4 + ZFS + XFCE 1280 MB 1 Gbps Ethernet 1.2 TB of HDDs; 2 x 2.5" HDDs (SATA-1, 320 GB), 3.5" IDE HDDs (250 GB + 320 GB) :) :) I use it as backup server for ~1 hour/week.

pretty snappy experience if you ask me

Slot I CPUs were great! I had a Pentium II (333 Mhz) that worked great (even with XP) that had a slot 1 CPU.

Why didn't you just use ndiswrapper? Also you can download a boot floppy image that you boot first and then it will allow you to boot from usb on any computer. You can even install it to the MBR and use it as a boot manager so you always have boot from usb functionality. You need the PLop boot manager or PLopKexec. I have had better luck with PLopKexec with more modern distros but the downside is that it can not be installed to the MBR. PLop boot manager can and works good for legacy distros.

Are you sure that this is an actual mechanical keyboard? Looks like a rubber dome to me

Dude what are you even doing? DWM all the way. It would fly.

Any plans on more videos with this pentium 3 computer?:)

it works with USB tethering.

I have no problem running Lubuntu with LXDE on machines with 256MB of RAM. It's not exactly fast, but definitely usable. Haven't updated them to the newest version with LXQt though, but as LXQt is supposedly more lightweight than LXDE, I'd say it shouldn't be a problem.

If you have an android phone I wonder if usb tethering would have worked?

i486 concurrent kernels should address the 2038 issue with 64bit timestamp_t.

Is it better to build a custom solid-style Buildroot system, or an external software package system is required?

Damn they forgot to include a windowmaker install option!

The simplest way is to get a PCI network card...

Can you test reactos on it please and report back? that would be great :)

I'll be impressed if you do i3 riceing on that.

Sad that you didn´t include KDE at the desktop environment option list. Would have liked to see the spec of it compared to the other ones there.

Awesome!

3:44 WAT! i3 eats so a huge memory?

I bet that is not a tv card, but a coax network card !

Tiny core you have to build up on it but Antix not as much

Haiku would probably work great on this.

wps office - telemetry

But can it run Doom?

Just load Arch on it with i3 Window Manager

I wonder if you could get Arch to run on a system that old...

A friend of mine is bringing over a 20-year old think dell I'm not sure it might be an HP but I'm going to try to run some sort of Linux on it I'll come back and let you know how it goes. #FOSSFUN

Try running a kernel 2.2, 2.4 distro on it

BSD would be an more appropriate choice for something like this.

Windows XP test

Try a USB to ethernet adapter

tiny eh

Can i install Antix on old celeron based desktop?

skip to 5:00, you are welcome.

A slot P3? Aren't those quite rare?

No LAN to USB? Shame.

Antix Would be good that what I use

de instalar se puede pero ya no navegar por internet solo como reproductor mp3

If i can instal linux on my pentium 3 laptop is totaly posible!

dwm and gentoo.

ndiswrapper would be useful

Tiny joke. Excuse me while i split my sides.

KDE anyone?

Try Poppy linux

Revenge of the nerd has spoken

But... can it run Crysis?! (with Proton or Wine)

Install Windows XP on it

Hi

antiX will work!