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.
Alfred
On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 07:14 -0400, 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.
There's too little memory to even get CentOS installed. You might want to take a look at RULE if you want a RH-derived distro.
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.
On 5/4/05, Aleksandar Milivojevic amilivojevic@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
Aleksandar Milivojevic wrote:
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.
If you want RHEL 2 then you could use CentOS-2. CentOS-2 will not install on this hardware though. What you can do is swap the hard disk into an i686 machine and install. Then install the i386 kernel, glibc & openssl and then swap the disk back into the older CPU box.
Using it as a web server should be OK. X will struggle.
John.
Thanks to all for your responses (both on and off the list). I think I will recommend that my friend use another distribution, as there were mixed responses to using CentOS (or RHEL) on such limited hardware. BTW, I think the web server will only serve static HTML pages.
Alfred
Just my $.02 - there are more appropriate distros that can do what you are asking.
Check out:
DSL Linux http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/index.html "Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram"
Vecor Linux http://www.vectorlinux.com/ "a distribution that only reguires 175 megs of disk space for full install and a system with 16MB of RAM"
On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 07:14 -0400, 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.
Alfred
CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
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.
Alfred
I would worry about the RAM. I am running my family server on a PII 266 with 256 of ram. No issues. I have a backup/test server which is a 133 with 64 of ram. No GUI on either of these systems though.
Doug
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Aleksandar Milivojevic -
Alfred von Campe -
Doug -
Greg Knaddison -
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams -
John Newbigin -
ryan