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Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

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Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#91

Post by throwawaytea »

zahlman wrote: post #66
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #28

The reason this advice is bizarre is that old memory isn't actually that dear. The machines that would have had 2GB of RAM or less would be from the Core 2 Duo era or so, taking DDR2 or DDR3, and typically supported 8-16GB. 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile, so who is going to suffer <2GB instead of 8GB over $10?

> 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 Where would I find it sold? > and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile Hey, I'm using one to write this :(

Facebook marketplace for one.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#92

Post by dansalvato »

initramfs wrote: post #59

Thanks for this link! "antiX is my top pick for truly constrained hardware. It runs on systemd-free Debian Stable, uses around 256MB at idle, and includes a full desktop experience. The trade-off is a less polished interface compared to Ubuntu-based options. If you need something even lighter, Puppy Linux runs entirely in RAM and can resurrect machines that most distros would reject. The learning curve is steeper, bu…

It's cool to see your interest in running Linux on highly constrained systems. I might check out eXe Linux, since I spent a bit of time messing with Linux on my Cr-48 Chromebook, which has an Atom N455.

Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linux. I figured hey, if I only have 2GB RAM and slow 16GB storage, I should have assurance that every single component on the machine is something I opted into installing. Problem is, I can't retain knowledge of the ins and outs of my fully custom environment unless I'm daily driving it, which...how exactly could I daily drive an N455 for anything, other than it being a thin client?

Here's my own blog post covering Arch Linux on the Cr-48: https://dansalva.to/resurrecting-a-prototype-chromebook-with...

Note that since my writing of that post, i915 graphics support in Wayland has been fixed, so it's now viable to run a Wayland DE if desired.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#93

Post by prmoustache »

joe_mamba wrote: post #45
Borg3 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a pathetic world.. and sad.. I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB.. If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling, I really get shivers... WTF?! How is that even possible? Bloat is astronomical and yet.. Most people just does NOT care...

> I have currently 2 browsers open and my memory commit is 370MB.. In what context? >If I hear that Win11 uses 3GB of RAM idling Modern Gnome and KDE distros with batteries included also idea at around 2GB RAM which is a useless metric anyway as Windows 11 also preloads frequently used takes and apps on boot.

Less than that, between 900MB and 1.2GB and that's due to file and stuff indexation. The good thing on Linux and BSDs is you can swap for a light wm/compositor and your back below 150MB idle.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#94

Post by mrob »

applfanboysbgon wrote: post #15

Don't get your OS recommendations from an LLM-generated article.

>"browser.cache.disk.enable: Set to false. This disables the disk cache, which is unnecessary if you have an SSD (RAM cache is fast enough) and actively harmful on old hard drives (constant small writes degrade performance)."

This paragraph especially feels LLM generated. It's nonsense (a fast disk makes disk cache more effective), with a "not even wrong" explanation (speed of RAM is unrelated to speed of disk). It's the kind of error you often see from LLMs, where you have the right words but no solid world model behind them. Of course, I can't actually prove it's LLM writing, and if it is then it appears to be edited by a human, but I don't recall ever seeing this kind of error from a known human writer.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#95

Post by mrob »

cogman10 wrote: post #75
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and zswap sends out compressed pages to swap. The article says they want to avoid swap hitting disk, so that seems counterproductive.

When you do zram, what happens is the pages sent to zram are compressed. But when those compressed pages need to be evicted to swap, they are decompressed before being sent there. It's not helping you to avoid hitting the disk, it's writing more to the disk. Zswap will still compress pages in ram. It only evicts to the disk when the in memory swap pool is filled. The difference being that the pages swapped to disk re…

I never want to evict pages to swap. If I loaded something, it's because I intend to run it, and I never want to wait. If there's not enough RAM, I'd rather have a userspace OOM killer kill the process early so I know I'm trying something impossible. (Or rely on the kernel OOM killing if it's actually capable of doing its job, but last I tried the default behavior under heavy memory pressure was to free any pages that can be restored from disk, even if swap is disabled, which makes the system equally unusable.) I don't care if rarely used pages are "wasted" by being kept in RAM. I want good worst-case performance, not good average-case performance.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#96

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

mrob wrote: post #95
cogman10 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you do zram, what happens is the pages sent to zram are compressed. But when those compressed pages need to be evicted to swap, they are decompressed before being sent there. It's not helping you to avoid hitting the disk, it's writing more to the disk. Zswap will still compress pages in ram. It only evicts to the disk when the in memory swap pool is filled. The difference being that the pages swapped to disk re…

I never want to evict pages to swap. If I loaded something, it's because I intend to run it, and I never want to wait. If there's not enough RAM, I'd rather have a userspace OOM killer kill the process early so I know I'm trying something impossible. (Or rely on the kernel OOM killing if it's actually capable of doing its job, but last I tried the default behavior under heavy memory pressure was to free any pages tha…

I mean, if your approach is zero swap of any kind then you wouldn't be using zram or zswap and it's a moot point, right? (Not that I disagree; I also have become fond of earlyoom)

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#97

Post by initramfs »

dansalvato wrote: post #92
initramfs wrote: post #59

Thanks for this link! "antiX is my top pick for truly constrained hardware. It runs on systemd-free Debian Stable, uses around 256MB at idle, and includes a full desktop experience. The trade-off is a less polished interface compared to Ubuntu-based options. If you need something even lighter, Puppy Linux runs entirely in RAM and can resurrect machines that most distros would reject. The learning curve is steeper, bu…

It's cool to see your interest in running Linux on highly constrained systems. I might check out eXe Linux, since I spent a bit of time messing with Linux on my Cr-48 Chromebook, which has an Atom N455. Although, if I'm getting silly enough to try making N455 usable (which was seriously underpowered even at launch), I'm probably going full-on tinkerer mode, which is why I used it as an excuse to learn about Arch Linu…

That's great information. I had no idea Chromebook prototypes started as early as N455, but since you're skilled with Arch, I'll recommend two distros(one isn't really a distro, but a toolkit) for your cr-48 : Tiny Core Linux, and NanoLinux. The latter is built on TCL and a distro was released on Sourcefourge around 2015- no releases since..

One could really optimize an N450 using a very light package manager over TCL, although it's possible you already have something like that on Arch. With TCL, more assembly is required.

I also used SliTaz on an EeePc 701 back in the day, and I used it more because it had out of the box wifi support. https://slitaz.org/en/ At just 30MB, quite unbeatable. The OS gets some updates still, but it's a smaller project and probably less known. I suppose you could also try Damn Small Linux 2024: https://www.damnsmalllinux.org/2024-download.html

Edit: I added some notes on my tests here, and found the codec that is supported on the N450: MPEG-2: https://github.com/hatonthecat/linux_distro_tests#exegnulinu...

https://youtu.be/jMUeePXx8Ek?is=d938n8NobjBjoOlc

What makes the N450 tolerable over the Celeron 630 and even N270 is that it has hyperthreading, so it's like a dual core computer in some cases, but technically single core. It's not as fast as the AMD C-50 (with better GPU and out of order instructions, but fast enough for very light weight applications.)

Admittedly, I don't use it as a daily driver and only test it when there's a lightweight distro I want to check. Knowing i915 supports Wayland makes me want to test it again

(The AMD FX series did something like this, saying their FX 8350 was 8 cores, but it was really 2-4 physical cores and 8 logical cores): https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ngnwp7/did_the_amd_fx_... (I have an FX-8320E, and it's not super slow though-quite fast in fact)

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#98

Post by maccard »

zahlman wrote: post #66
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #28

The reason this advice is bizarre is that old memory isn't actually that dear. The machines that would have had 2GB of RAM or less would be from the Core 2 Duo era or so, taking DDR2 or DDR3, and typically supported 8-16GB. 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile, so who is going to suffer <2GB instead of 8GB over $10?

> 8GB of DDR3 is currently in the ballpark of $10 Where would I find it sold? > and the machines that take it can be found by the pallet in the "free e-waste" pile Hey, I'm using one to write this :(

EBay has dozens for <£12

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#99

Post by WCSTombs »

I don't know how a "complete" guide can completely fail to mention NVIDIA. It doesn't seem straightforward to support older NVIDIA cards (on any OS, to be fair, not just on Linux). That's currently one of the issues with my 2013 Dell laptop that has a Quadro K1100M.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#100

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

liendolucas wrote: post #21

If you think Linux is a good candidate for older hardware (which it is) wait until you try a BSD.

NetBSD is easier to run from RAM with no swap

Linux is still awkward when it comes to "OOM", the output of df -h is not accurate

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