Single core, 32 bit CPU, can’t even do video playback on VLC. But it kinda works for some offline work, like text editing, and even emulation through zsnes! It’s crazy how Linux keeps old hardware like this running.

Thankfully though, this laptop CPU is upgradable, and so is the ram, so I’m planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century 😄

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlMEnglish
    5·
    1 day ago

    I’m planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century

    I think it was born in the 21st century? From this it looks like the first Celeron M was in 2004, and the first at that clockspeed was 2005.

    Also, 2GB of RAM is plenty for many purposes - that’s more than any Raspberry Pi before the Pi 4 had!

    • merci3@lemmy.worldOP
      4·
      1 day ago

      Actually… You’re right about the 21st century lmao. I just wanted an excuse to quote Metal Gear Solid

      Also, the issue is not ram itself, of course, 2GB is enough for lots of fun on Linux, it’s the CPU that’s killing me

  • 4shtonButcher@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    1 day ago

    Pretty sure my dad’s secondary desktop I used for my first Linux install had a 1.2 GHz Duron or something and 512 MB. I’m pretty sure I got that funky compiz fusion 3D-cube desktop running on there 😅

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    6·
    1 day ago

    Stories from the “good” old days running Linux on a 386 machine with 4 MB or less of memory aside, in the present day it’s still perfectly normal to run Linux on a much weaker machine as a server - you can just rent a the cheapest VPS you can find (which nowadays will have 128 MB, maybe 256MB, and definitelly only give you a single core) and install it there.

    Of course, it won’t be something with X-Windows or Wayland, much less stuff like LibreOffice.

    I think the server distribution of Ubunto might fit such a VPS, though there are server-specific Linux distros that will for sure fit and if everything fails TinyCore Linux will fit in a potato.

    I current have a server like that using AlmaLinux on a VPS with less than 1GB in memory, which is used only as a Git repository and that machine is overkill for it (it’s the lowest end VPS with enough storage space for a Git repository big enough for the projects I’m working on, so judging by the server management interface and linux meminfo, that machine’s CPU power and memory are in practice far more than needed).

    If you’re willing to live with a command line interface, you can run Linux on $50 worth of hardware.

    • vvvvv@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      only give you a single core

      And boy would that core be shitty and over-provisioned.

  • jj4211@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 day ago

    can’t even do video playback on VLC.

    I remember back in the day when I downloaded the first divx file my K6-400 couldn’t smoothly play… I had been so used to thinking of that as a powerhouse coming from my Pentium 60, which was the first one I ran Linux on.

  • drathvedro@lemm.ee
    4·
    1 day ago

    I have a 2001 compaq n600 still being used from time to time as a gateway for old tech as it has COM as well as LPT and analog video outs. It has 1.2ghz celeron, 512mb ram, 30 gig drive. Thing is kind of a beast for its time as my own desktop at that time was nowhere close to its spects. Thing was gifted to me after initially being given to install win7 on it. After telling the guy that this isnt going to happen and the best they couldd hope for is winxp and even then it’d struggle, they told me “oh, so linux is the only option then… well, it doesnt work for me. Have it, then, have fun with it!”. I put ubuntu on it, but still gnome ground the poor cpu to a halt, so I had to switch to Xfce. Luckily it turned good enough not to downgrade further to things like bare X or Kolibri OS. Worked as a solitaire machine for my dad for a few years, helped me fix and set up stuff on a few occasions, but nowadays mostly collecting dust in my drawer.

  • wewbull@feddit.ukEnglish
    68·
    2 days ago

    I think my lowest was a 33 MHz 486sx (maybe DX) with 8MB of RAM.

    I wouldn’t want to try it today though.

    • Rose@piefed.socialEnglish
      16·
      2 days ago

      The first machine I ran Linux on was a 486DX 33MHz too. I think it had 8 MB (or some weird thing like 4 MB originally and randomly stuck 8 MB addition? I don’t remember anymore.)

      • folekaule@lemmy.world
        9·
        2 days ago

        I had the exact same configuration. 4MB RAM upgraded to 8MB. 40MB HDD upgraded to 200MB later. And the fugliest case with triangular pastel buttons you ever saw. Ran Windows 3.11 then Slackware Linux on that for many years.

        • vandsjov@feddit.dk
          2·
          2 days ago

          I started on a DX2 66 MHz with 4 MB RAM and 420 MB HDD. 4 x 1 MB modules. Later upgraded to 20 MB RAM (added 4 x 4 modules) and a 1.2 GB Matrox HDD that need an extra driver to be used. With 20 MB I created a RAM drive, copied Doom to it and ran it - loaded real fast but frame rate was horrible.

        • dylanmorgan@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          2 days ago

          Who used those triangular pastel buttons? I remember seeing them on some friends’ computers but not on any Dells or Gateway 2000 machines. Maybe Compaq? Or Packard Bell?

          • folekaule@lemmy.world
            1·
            2 days ago

            I have not been able to find the case again since. It was a local shop that built it from parts, so it was not a big brand. I didn’t pick the parts either, since I knew nothing about PCs at the time, and it showed lol.

            Edit: it was a white/beige mini tower. If I recall correctly, it was similar to a lot of cases at the time, with a black band across and a circular button on the right. The turbo and reset buttons were pink and teal in the shape of triangles. I purchased it in 1992 when I needed a PC for college.

    • addie@feddit.uk
      6·
      2 days ago

      Yeah, mine was similar. Had some old Win95 machines from work that were getting thrown away; scavenged as much RAM as possible into one case and left Red Hat Linux downloading overnight on the company modem. Needed two boxes of floppy disks for the installer, and I joined up a 60 MB and an 80MB hard drive using LVM to create the installation drive. It was a surprisingly functional machine - much better at networking than it was as a Win95 computer - but yeah, those days are long gone.

    • Grimtuck@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 days ago

      I was running my Gateway 2000 486 sx33 with Linux did she extended amount of time as a router with NAT. I’ve still got it somewhere in the loft.

  • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    I had slackware on my 386DX 40. 4mb ram. It was kinda short-lived. I never got my modem working. I got a book, paged thought it. Learning shit was hard in the 90’s Internet.

    • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      I got my modem working in Slackware in 1997 - but the PPP driver (equivalent of WinSock - which worked in Windows quite well at the time) would only work during the first boot of the system. After a reboot, PPP would never return, and the best I got out of the internet about it at the time (mostly using my Windows PC) was “real men connect to the internet through ethernet.”

      Between that an the useless (unless you enjoy frustration) sound drivers, I declared Linux “not ready for prime time,” and left it to others until starting back in via Cygwin in 2003, then Gentoo (for 64 bit access you couldn’t get any other way) in 2005.

      • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        22 hours ago

        Yeah I did another couple of false starts over the next couple of years. This time at different jobs. I finally made friends with Redhat on a laptop with Enlightenment WM. I managed to stay Linux in the desktop for the next 14 years. KDE, Gnome , switch to Ubuntu when Red hat decided to go and split out the door, went back to Fedora when Cannocial had their bad boy phase. OSX lured me away and 2015 I think it was. Super disappointed with the level of control I had over the OS, I went back to Windows for WSL. Continued* on that until Debian got their shit back together (nonfree). Eventually slid into NixOS, I don’t know if it’s as painful as slack where I was but it certainly feels like it, and I kind of missed that.

        • MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish
          1·
          22 hours ago

          I did OS-X for my MacBookPro daily driver 2006-2008 (said premium laptop dying because of mis-applied thermal paste by the factory) - and started using a bit of Debian and RedHat at the time… my observation was, and still is: they all suck, but in different ways. If you value stability and control, there’s no comparison to the open source model. Windows used to have the edge for hardware support, but that has eroded to the point that we had selected a WiFi card for our Linux system this year, but we’re having to change now that we’re moving to Win11 - no Windows drivers for that M.2 WiFi/BT card.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Similar story but I just installed slackware on one of the University PCs (they just had a handful of PCs in the general computer room for the students and nobody actually watched over us) since I did not have a PC yet (only had a ZX Spectrum at the timback then).

      Trying to get X-Windows to work in Slackware was interesting, to say the least: back then you had to manually create your own video timings configuration file to get the graphics to work - which means defining the video mode at the very low level, such as configuring the number of video clock cycles between end-of-line-drawing and horizontal-retrace - and fortunatelly I didn’t actually blow up any monitor (which was possible if you did the configuration wrong).

      At least we had some access to the Internet (most things were blocked but we had Usenet and e-email and one could use FTPmail gateways to download stuff from remote servers) via Ethernet, so that part was easy.

      Anyways, my first reaction looking at the OP’s post was like: yeah, if they’re running X it’s probably a too powerfull machine.

      • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        My favorite part of the first configuration of x back then, you screw with the conf for ages, manage to get a viable video mode set, startx for the billionth time… gray screen, mouse cursor… Overflowingly happy… Wait, now what? No program manager, no apps, no terminal, No exit, no shutdown. What’s a window manager? The least apparent thing in the world being to switch consoles , export a display variable, and start an xtern in the video console.

        We worked so hard for every little thing.

        • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          1 day ago

          Yeah, but at least we knew how to switch consoles.

          I bet that most Linux users nowadays don’t event know the CTRL+ALT+Fx shortcuts to switch console.

          Can’t say that the old days were really “good” compared to what we had now, but there was definitelly a lot of satisfaction in step by step getting the system to work.

          • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
            3·
            1 day ago

            Oh God no, You’re 100% correct on all that. We were living through endorphins and we now have something in between nostalgia and Stockholm syndrome for the old days.