[CentOS] Running CentOS on very old hardware

[Greg Knaddison]

On 5/4/05, Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca> wrote:
> Alfred von Campe wrote:
> > A friend has an old Pentium-133 laptop with 32MB of memory and a 1.3 GB
> > hard disk that he wants to use as a web server for a very small
> > community.  Will CentOS (or any other RHEL derived distribution for that
> > matter) install and run with acceptable performance on such a system, or
> > will a specialized distribution like Damn Small Linux be a better
> > choice?  In this case, disk space is not a big concern so getting the
> > smallest footprint is not a high priority.
> 
> Either put more memory, or go with some older distribution.  CentOS 3.x
> might run on it, not sure what are memory requirements for it.  RHEL 2.x
> would run even better.
> 
> 64MB should be more that enough for CentOS4 as long as you use it as
> dedicated plain web server (no fancy stuff, no PHP, no databases, only
> static content).  SSL would slow down things somewhat, but would be
> acceptable.  If you install only basic packages (no X, no additional
> utilities, no development packages) the installation will take up
> somewhere around 500MB.
> 

Here is a good document covering installing Fedora on "old" hardware.

http://www.simpaticus.com/linux/barebones-server-howto.php

Rodolfo is always looking for feedback and more data points, so if
your friend can let him know about RHEL4 and/or RHEL3 then that would
be very useful to his documents.

Regards,
Greg