This Pentium 4 is Surprisingly Usable 

Click my trainwell (formerly CoPilot) link go.trainwell.net/ActionRetro to get 14 days FREE with your own personal trainer!

We are lucky to have linux

Side-Note: Using XFCE is very important, and can make things better and more faster.

FWIW I think you were missing 3D acceleration the entire time, classiccube should have run much better than that (it does just fine on a 233MHz PPC for example) it appears there is some kernel fiddling needed to get that specific GPU to work properly. Kernel bug 206697, comment 14 may be helpful if you want to continue that adventure.

The heat from Pentium Can warm a mid-sized town

Make sure to run glxinfo to check if gpu acceleration is there. Probably you're running on cpu. Classicube also shows error at 11:56 libglerror: failed to load driver: radeon

"let's find another game that runs a little better" I don't know how, but I KNEW it was going to be Sauerbraten

That Panasonic is a good looking laptop (for its time). It's good to see it running a modern OS so well.

During the last heatwave, I installed PeppermintOS on an old 32 bit laptop. I also have Antix running on an old 32 bit netbook. And with Falkon as a browser, I have absolutely no problem going on the Internet.

My first laptop had a Pentium4 2.4GHz CPU and an NVidia GeForce 4 440MX graphics adapter. It was large, heavy but pretty powerfull. 11:50 Looks like you were missing the Radeon library for 3D. You'd need to add proper Mesa library packages.

I absolutely love these mad science experiments. Also love how surprisingly usable this is for really light stuff, especially as a low-distraction device for something like writing that can do some things on the Internet but nothing particularly well.

You can do better than a P4! I have a Pentium 133 (non-MMX) running Slackware 11 on a kernel 2.6 with a PCI Radeon 9250 running full 3D. :) Gets 250FPS in glxgears, though I can't get much else running because I only have 64MB of RAM, barely enough to run X with FVWM/TWM.

I do believe that laptop was cleaner than the day it was new. I almost mistaken in for CGI'd.

I could see that you were peeking at your cheat sheet during the trainwell "interview".

I absolutely love your videos about antique laptops with Linux on them! Please do a comparison of lightweight distros like these.

Have you tried Void Linux? It's specifically made for older systems like this, they have a Pentium 4 build as a matter of fact

These operating systems that don't 'push the processor so hard' are not just great for older machines, but they are great for 'Going Green', too. With a power meter, I was shocked to discover that Windows 3.1 uses a full 10 watts more power than the exact-same computer running DOS 6.11.

When it comes to hot CPUs, the Pentium 4 crawled so the Phenom II X4 could walk. The Phenom II X4 walked so the FX-8150 could run. And the FX-8150 ran so the i9-14900K could sprint.

RU-vid playback on this thing reminds me of streaming video on dial up in the 90's. Fire up Real Player!

Thank you little hamster for making computers this old run well.

I’ve been bouncing in and out for the Linux content for a while but this one made me subscribe. I LOVE making old hardware do new hardware things through the power of modern Linux.

I never thought P4 would be usable in this day and age even with Linux, until I tried it and surprised myself a couple years ago (with Lubuntu). Albeit with a somewhat modern PCIe GPU and SSD, and 4GB RAM. With the compositing and video decoding (1440p no less) offloaded to the GPU, it is actually more than serviceable. Not having to write to swap on spinning rust all the time also helps greatly. I can have a handful of RU-vid video tabs open at once and still have memory to spare.

DVD playback should be possible, we managed it back in the day.

Nice - did not know about this distribution - thanks for sharing.

You can watch RU-vid videos with mpv just fine

10:25 I know firefox is everyone's favorite Linux browser, but I strongly recommend chromium on a system this low spec, from my own experience it runs significantly faster, multiple times faster on certain systems. I don't know if it's something about the core count or the ram or what, but older systems run chromium better than firefox pretty consistently.

I had a Fujitsu Siemens laptop that used a desktop P4 CPU. It was lightning fast but after a minute or so, the fans came on at full speed. The hefty battery lasted about 15 to 30 minutes. Still darn useful.

Ooh, a toughbook CF-48. Over the last 13 years, I have used the CF-52, CF-53, CF-54, and now the FZ-55.

Interesting vid, I might just give a shot at installing adali on my MacBook 1,1 since it’s stuck on the core duo era.

From my own i can tell you that Debian 12 on Pentium 4 Northwood 2.0GHz with no dedicated GPU and 385mb of DDR1 ram it runs okay with the Openbox desktop environment. Maybe it would run even better with DWM

I noticed while Sean was loading ClassiCube the terminal complained about not being able to load the radeon accelerator driver so it's completely running on software rendering

Had a similar experience installing a distro called antix on a dell netbook. Pretty nice. But 8gb of hard drive space just isn't enough to comfortably run a full fat modern linux distro of any kind it seems.

My first and last traditional PC was a Celeron D Prescott on 478 socket. A single core 2.4 ghz if i’m remember right. What a time to be alive, 512 MB of RAM, AGP ATI video card and trusty 80 GB Maxtor HDD. That CPU get overclocked to 3.2 ghz with stock cooler and i was trying all linux distros that can run on that. It might still working, last time i was trying in 2017, get a grub error and turned off.

Glad you brought up your fitness journey dude. Yeah, during rona times, I got the Rona 20. lol! mid 2022 got into the keto/carnivore thing (watched Dr. Ken Berry's stuff) and without changing my running stuff I was already doing, I dropped almost 30. and SLEEP was a big deal. My reduction in sleep apena (that was brought on by "fatty tongue", I'd heard about fatty liver, but?) was great for all aspects of my life. Less groggy, more energy and all that. Keep up the great work! sugar, carbs and seed oils, and alcohol(which is sugar bascially) can basically be eliminated. I'm not a doctor and this is not advice. Like in Crypto/stocks DYOR. :-)

Some Pentium IV parts have EM64T. They're 64 bit processors, so they're compatible with even most modern Linuxes

Nice demo. Why didn't you upgrade the memory at the same time as the hdrive?

I own a 2003 Pentium 4 with 1.5 Go of ram and a 120 Ide Hard Drive, It works on Pepermint Linux and can use it sometimes in my garage to watch some videos or download technical PDF. Of course on you tube you need to download the videos as online it is too slow but it works fine. One day I 'll add a ssd drive to see if that makes sense but not sure. Otherwise I own many computers on different linux distros like Bohdi Linux for I3 or Linux mint Mate for 1 st and 2 nd I5 Generations, everything works fine. You can also use your old pentium 4 as a storage device from time to time, it might still help. Thx for keeping old hardwares alive, I really like your channel. A french guy !

Never heard of Adelie Linux before, looks similar to Xubuntu that I use on my Fujitsu Celsius H700 laptop. Nice that Adelie supports other architectures aswell, I'll maybe try it on my HP ZD8000 laptop, aswell as a dual PIII 1.4ghz 2gb ram system that I have. Also have a G3, G4 and a G5. Thanks so much for showing us this, it brings new life to older pc's and macs.

Something good to watch while I fix my install of Artix which I migrated to Parabola. I’ll get startx working eventually. 😅

Right in time

Great video. Never heard of this distro before so I'm downloading it. I just think the pace of PC HW improvements has slowed. In my lifetime, I went from PCs not existing to the first i3/i5/i7 and it all seemed so fast, but then all these 13 generations since then, tiny changes each gen.

I ended up using a Pentium M until 2020... Video calling on Zoom and Google Meet worked, but it just got too slow to do anything else. RU-vid worked in 480p pretty well and I didn't see a need to upgrade. 2GB RAM felt like plenty though.

I'll defiantly be putting adelie Linux on my thinkpad T41 which is a Pentium M laptop that can barely handle Debian with LXQt. It's crazy how smooth those windows move on a Pentium 4!

Right video in time.

Always very cool watching what you do. I have a flat panel "iLamp" 800MHz that I've tried installing Adelie, Gentoo, Arch, Mint...but I'm a Linux N00B and it's clear there are video driver compatibility issues and I'm not sure how to get the right drivers in there (or even if I can find the right drivers) for the Linux install to work. I have many other older machines I've successfully installed Linux on too, although mainly because it installed without issue. There are a number of 20-so year old machines you can get for next to free which will run modern Linux just fine!

Great video, Ty. Back in the day I managed to get VCDs to work on my daughter's Pentium I PC with only 16mb of ram, which were much better than your low resolution of 140. The problem isn't the video per se, its sadly the streaming platform and all of the additional bloatware and telemetry that comes with it that slows things down.

Just use AntiX linux. Runs fine on my Pentium III Dell Latitude with 384 MB of RAM and a 32GB SSD.

I'd like to see you try out René Rebe's T/2 SDE distro in a future episode. It supports like a dozen architectures and just had a major new release.

In line with Linux's penguin theme, I'm sure Adélie Linux alludes to the Adélie penguin.

everybody is saying Pentium 4 in their videos and videos' title , but they forget something very important to mention , the socket . There's pentium 4 for socket 478 and pentium 4 for socket LGA775

well, this is going to be tried on my pentium 3 1.2GHz and my mac mini g4! Thanks!

I've got a Panasonic CF-47 - very reminiscent of this one, but older (p2 era) and its specced as a Toughbook. The lack of information on machines like that on the internet is really surprising though, especially from a big manufacturer like Panasonic...

Just installed Q4OS on an Inspiron 1150 with a Pentium 4. Running good!

Cool shirt. The Adelie Linux OS, might have to test it out, sometime. Thanks. Cool Laptop Linux OS Tune Up! 😺💻🥰💎

I have a Sony Vaio pcv-rs630g with a Pentium 4 3.2ghz. It is somehow very quick and even internet browsing is snappy!

I was really impressed with my 2GHz Pentium 4 laptop when I got it to play 240p RU-vid at around 20fps recently. I was using the K-Meleon browser under windows xp.

Love the shirt there, Sean. In the words of Admiral Akbar, "It's an unimplemented trap!" 😂

Now that's cool.

I'd so love to see one of these vids showing the best OS to run on an old 2007 MacBook. Picked a black one up for $10 from the pawnshop that incredibly still works and I'm just curious what the heck to do with it!

Also for youtube playback on anything older than 2016, i would reccomend h264ify or any way to force the old h264 codec over the AV1 and VP8/VP9 codecs that most hardware can't decode, so it has to do by "brute force"

I believe you may have given me hope yet for my 2003 compaq to dual xp and adelie as every "lightweight" distro ive tried crawls and just pins the cpu and ssd doing swap

I should try installing this on my CF-W5 when I refurbish & upgrade it. Last thing I tried on it was a fairly modern ubuntu because I already had a disc laying around, it was chugging a bit on an empty gnome desktop lol. Even though the CF-W5 is 5 years newer than this, it was a slim and passively-cooled model, so came with a more underpowered CPU.

Man, in 2000 I got my first PC to go off to college with and it was a Celeron. Later on I got a Slot A Athlon. The Pentium 4 coming out at the same time just seems insane to me now. But budgets will budget.

I recognize that episode of Doctor Who you just played. It's from SEries three and is called Gridlock if I'm not mistaken.

P4 reminds an early attempt to deliver the windows running wall heater or the cooking stove.

This is very cool! I’d be curious to see FreeBSD or NetBSD on this machine too, since they’re also modern OSes with i386 support. Probably not as zippy out of the box as adelie though

I have a couple of P4 computers i use. They all run debian linux on them. Some of them have been dedicated to server status (they only boot up when needed. my power bill can handle the 100W for a few hours every month) and a few of them are basically thin clients. I install remmina and use that to rdp into my "general purpose" VM that has plenty of resources. One of my P4 computers i use as a thin client is a panasonic CF-U1. I have debian boot off a SD card. I have been throwing around the idea of putting a raspberry pi CM4 or something like that in the SSD bay and seeing if i can get that to be usable for modern software.

Ooh! What's that shiny round thing? So pretty! :P edit: Always surprises me to see a default-ish Xfce install after being used to Mint's more Windows-like setup for it...

the first few seconds of the video were cool PENTIUM 4 LINUX YEAHHHHHHHH

i actually used to own this exact model of Panasonic, along with a CF-47 good machines

Wow. OK. I bought the same laptop about a month ago from a local thrift store. I have been wondering what OS to run. This is a timely video.

I am going to try this out on my dual 867 G4 MDD tower.

I had one of those Socket 423 Willamette P4s at 1.3 GHz, and while it served my purposes for 4 years, it wasn't particularly inspiring in performance. I still miss that thing, though. But if I want the 32-bit early to mid 2000s nostalgia hit, I can just use my IBM ThinkPad T42 lol. Ooh, maybe I can install Adelie Linux on that, too!

What is your plan for it's use if youtube doesn't work? Maybe a micro computer emulator for a Zx Spectrum?

This sort of holds true though even today, Some of the high-end 12th gen CPUs even in the same general class may be faster than some of the newer 13th gen ones in the same class, as there usually is some overlap between generations. The Pentium (4) M processors were lower-power variants for laptops so it's no wonder some P4's (particularly those for laptops) were slower than perhaps their higher-end P3 siblings. Of all the ports on the back (which that would have been well-equipped in 2000) only about 2 (maybe 3, the VGa too) would be applicable today (and the USB is really only good for low-data transfers for perhiperhals so that might even be a stretch, but at least the Ethernet port is still widely used, although that one may have only been a 10/100 NIC). The SSD may be helping a bit though, particularly when opening new Windows. But my guess is that the windowing environment is also prbably very basic as well, and it may also be using a lot more of the CPU since integrated graphics was common at that time, so the CPU did a lot of the work possibly tapping into the RAM when needed. I mean up until Windows 7, you could run that (slowly) on a system with only 1GB of RAM and more importantly a 64MB video card (128MB was needed for special effects).

I was searching for a good x86 distro for my old computers, I've found it! :)

Somebody is on a health journey, looking good.

Debian still has support for 32-bit. A royal pain to set up on old hardware, however. Running 12.5 on a Northwood 2.8 / Radeon 9600.

I'll definitly try Adelie Linux on my old Compaq Presario 2800, which has an Intel Pentium 4 inside.

Dosdude saves the day yet again.

I put full fat Fedora on an old Core 2 Quad machine from 2007 with 8GB RAM and a Radeon HD 7770. Its definitely not a gaming rig but it does everything you could ask a casual daily driver PC to do. 1080P youtube is no problem.

i'm going to try this on an lg intel atom netbook from 2008 (it was a "ulcpc")

Honestly, I'm kinda missing older-style laptops and even some keyboards they had. Especially the IBM ThinkPad 380XD It Honestly Looks like a laptop used for something like activating launch codes, but boi is it's keyboard wonderful to type on. Very tactile and some good travel.

You should try to run Scrcpy to use it as a monitor for a phone. I ran Scrcpy( on q4os) on a laptop with an atom n570 and 2 GB ram. I could mirror my phone screen at 480p perfectly fine, which is amazing considering how the laptop struggles to run RU-vid at the same resolution

Omgg I have a Gateway with a 1.7ghz P4 and 2gb of RD ram. Need to try this!

is there a zram-tools for adelie? Can it build log2ram to lower writes to the SSD? Very cool! Not a powerhouse of a processor, but dang if it can't run lightweight XFCE smoothly! Keep em coming!!!!

Those Blue Man Group commercials and creepy IBM Linux kid commercials have stuck in my brain better than just about anything else from that time

"Lazy fast" got me 😂

Heck Linux was quite usable on a 486DX2 66 back in the 90es... so I am not shocked it would work well on a Pentium 4.

You might want to try AntiX linux. It's a lightweight Debian, with a full APT package manager. And also DSL (Damn Small Linux) has made a recent comeback after like 12 years hiatus... DSL is now basically an even more lightweight AntiX, and will run on a potatoe.

Maybe using something like jwm or fvwm will help: XFCE4 is using already about 50% of your RAM! Those extra hundreds of MB of RAM can help a bit with performance

Gosh this reminds me of the bad old days of running Xubuntu 10.04 on a Pentium 3 800mhz Toughbook. I think i maxed out the ram at 512mb. It was a tie between using windows 2000 and Linux back then for me because Linux ran better but web browsing and namely flash player was superior in speed on windows (even windows 2000)

would you add Urban Terror to your suite of 'games to try'? its a stand alone game based on quake 3

Now I actually have hope that modern Linux is usable(-ish) on my old P4 desktop once I have access to that again. :)

Linux has gotten so much better the last few years

13:37 I wonder how well it could play youtube if you used yt-dlp and mpv/vlc. Surely 360p would work?

Alpine (which Adelie is based on) is pretty great, but the musl C library makes it a bit of a pain compatibility wise. Seamonkey used to be the browser of choice on old systems - for a long time it was the default on puppylinux, not sure if that's changed, or if it was available in Adelie. You might have a better experience with using Dillo-plus.

I got am old tine Fujitsu from a storage box. It had a core solo and 1gb ram running XP. I found a modern web browser that would run on it and tried youtube. Same result so I just gave it away.

Maybe someone has already suggested you need to monitor with something a lot more flat, but FYI it's 'booming' a heck of a lot: somewhere in the upper-lows to low-mids. I'm listening on TRUTH B2023A reference monitors, everything else across all types of content sounds very flat.

Need to walk back to older Pantium mchines. My early onr was 200 mMHz MMX.