[CentOS] Running CentOS on very old hardware

Wed May 4 17:58:37 UTC 2005
Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@ieee.org> <thebs413 at earthlink.net>

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 at pbl.ca>
Sent: May 4, 2005 10:09 AM
To: CentOS mailing list <centos at 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.

-- 
Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca>    Pollard Banknote Limited
Systems Administrator                           1499 Buffalo Place
Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276                     Winnipeg, MB  R3T 1L7
_______________________________________________
CentOS mailing list
CentOS at centos.org
http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos


--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org