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Just wanted to show off the lowest end hardware I ever ran Linux on (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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 😄

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've run Linux on a 166MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM. There's not much modern software that will run on that hardware though.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    I have been operating a DNS-232 NAS with 32 MB RAM and ARM CPU with lighty webserver for a while. It could run MoinMoinWiki, written in Python 2, acceptably. Slowest thing I have tried to work on was a 386. But this one was slow - compiling the kernel took an eternity.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    You would be surprised. If you stay text only and use a 32 bit distro, it would run up to date versions of most CLI programs.

    Adelie and Arch32 still support Pentium.

    Booting to a GUI, there are still a few options. I think Velox would run on that. I bet Xorg with FVWM would too. You are not going to have much left for apps though. However, you could run a couple of terminals.

    Adelie Linux (totally modern Linux distro) lists 64 MB as the minimum server memory requirement.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I ran Damn Small Linux on it about 15 years ago. That worked pretty well and it would even run a web browser. It would probably boot Tiny Core Linux, but there wouldn't be much RAM left to run any programs. The motherboard supports 128MB, but it's not really worth the cost to upgrade it though.

    I may see about resurrecting that computer. I've got an old Motorola police radio that I would like to reprogram to operate in the 2M ham band and I think that PC will run the programming software.

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