Pre-i686 (PPro-P4, K6/Athlon, Cyrix M2/C3, WinChip2?) architectures take issue some applications. E.g., Red Hat, among other distros, have not bothered with pre-i686 NPTL support. There are better distros for i486 (K5, Cyrix Mx/M1, WinChip) or i586 (exactly Pentium-only) architectures than anything Fedora Core based (RHEL), SuSE Linux based (SLES/NOES), Mandrake Linux or similarly based.
Although Cobind Linux is supposedly a rebuild of Fedora for older systems. And I've found it runs XFCE pretty good on as little as 48MB. I know Alan Cox used to boast he ran Fedora Core 2 (same core/packages as RHEL4) with XFCE on as little as 48MB on a WinChip2 225MHz (not sure if the IDT Centaur WinChip2 was i486 or i686 ISA compatible though).
-----Original Message----- From: Aleksandar Milivojevic amilivojevic@pbl.ca Sent: May 4, 2005 10:09 AM To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org Subject: Re: [CentOS] Running CentOS on very old hardware
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.
Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org wrote:
Pre-i686 (PPro-P4, K6/Athlon, Cyrix M2/C3, WinChip2?) architectures take issue some applications. E.g., Red Hat, among other distros, have not bothered with pre-i686 NPTL support. There are better distros for i486 (K5, Cyrix Mx/M1, WinChip) or i586 (exactly Pentium-only) architectures than anything Fedora Core based (RHEL), SuSE Linux based (SLES/NOES), Mandrake Linux or similarly based.
This was true for Fedora Core 2, and only handfull of packages were affected with the problem. The problem was that db libraries were compiled with NPTL, and some programs linked against the db library failed to work correctly because of that (cyrus-imapd seems to be the most problematic one).
The Apache web server was not affected by this problem, at least not in simple/default configuration.
The i386 glibc package on Core 3 should have NPTL support (it isn't i386 clean anymore, since for NPTL support it needs to include at least i486 instructions, however it is still labeled as i386 for some reason). If this updated glibc package is part of RHEL4, than everything should work correctly on i586 machines.
Since the kernel is the only i586/i686 package in RHEL4 , and the rest of the system uses i386 instructions (apart from glibc that uses i486 to implement NPTL, if they did same hack as on FC3), the distribution should work on i486 too with custom compiled kernel.
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Aleksandar Milivojevic -
Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith＠ieee.org>