Oh, hey... my Debian rant reminded me of something! I have Debian running on a 486-25 with 12MB of RAM. (Pause for laughter...) Okay. Now then. When I run dpkg (on its own, or via apt-get) it wants about 18M of RAM to work with. This causes a fair deal of thrashing, and if I just let it go, it takes about 30 minutes to install even the most basic package. My solution thus far is to use the NBD driver to mount a swap space over the network. This is actually faster because the swap and actual package install don't have to contend for precious HDD seek time, and I can install the most basic packages in about 10 minutes or so. Even so, it would be nice if it were a bit faster still. Anyone know what dpkg does with its RAM? Is it loading all the packges into memory to figure out dependencies and stuff? Any way to make it behave more efficiently? -Chuck
"Chuck Homic" <chuck@vvisions.com> wrote:
Oh, hey... my Debian rant reminded me of something!
I have Debian running on a 486-25 with 12MB of RAM. [...]
Hey, mind if I ask what you use it for? The reason I ask is that I'm on a list dedicated to old PC hardware users, which until recently equated to a base of fanatical DOS holdouts. Slowly though, most are inquiring about Linux, so I'd like to give them some useful info about using Debian as a "modern" distribution on low-resource systems. Unfortunately, I've had to dump most of my old systems, so can't speak from first-hand experience anymore. Stephen Darnold, the guy who put Basic Linux together, used to lurk there, and there was often extensive discussion on what could be run on older hardware. Yours sounds like the lower end of the spectrum, so I'm wondering how well it works. Would it work well with Debian specifically as a firewall/gateway? Would you say the benefits of running something current offsets the inconvenience of those delays with installs etc.? Thanks, - Bob
for the last few years. I've been running a 486SX-25 with 8M RAM and 100M HD here at my work as a print server. I rescued the box from a pile of garbage. I'm running slackware 3.6 with a 2.0.39 kernel though. Just setup samba and lpd to do the printing. The machine has excellent reliability. These old boxes work fine for print servers, routers, firewalls, Old machines work great to for automation of real world things. Set a voltage, read a voltage, set bit, clear bit control applications. here is the box: #df Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on /dev/hda2 97271 83435 8813 90% / # cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 cpu : 486 model : Cx486 vendor_id : CyrixInstead stepping : unknown, core/bus clock ratio: unknownx fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no fpu : no fpu_exception : no cpuid : no wp : yes flags : bogomips : 4.71 # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 6684 6300 384 4500 1960 2200 -/+ buffers/cache: 2140 4544 Swap: 16432 536 15896 On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Bob George wrote:
"Chuck Homic" <chuck@vvisions.com> wrote:
Oh, hey... my Debian rant reminded me of something!
I have Debian running on a 486-25 with 12MB of RAM. [...]
Hey, mind if I ask what you use it for? The reason I ask is that I'm on a list dedicated to old PC hardware users, which until recently equated to a base of fanatical DOS holdouts. Slowly though, most are inquiring about Linux, so I'd like to give them some useful info about using Debian as a "modern" distribution on low-resource systems. Unfortunately, I've had to dump most of my old systems, so can't speak from first-hand experience anymore.
Stephen Darnold, the guy who put Basic Linux together, used to lurk there, and there was often extensive discussion on what could be run on older hardware. Yours sounds like the lower end of the spectrum, so I'm wondering how well it works. Would it work well with Debian specifically as a firewall/gateway? Would you say the benefits of running something current offsets the inconvenience of those delays with installs etc.?
Thanks,
- Bob
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-- ¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø Karl Hiramoto <karl@hiramoto.org> Work: 978-425-2090 ext 25 Cell: 508-517-4819 http://karl.hiramoto.org/ AOL IM ID = KarlH420 Yahoo_IM = karl_hiramoto ¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, for if you hit a man with a plowshare, he's going to know he's been hit.
Old boxes are great for low CPU jobs, as long as you don't take it too far. Eventually, even machines that run fine for their purposes can be a drain on resources. I've been trying to get my girlfriend's dad to retire this box for a while now: exponent:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 cpu : 386 model : unknown vendor_id : unknown stepping : unknown fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : no cpuid : no wp : no flags : bogomips : 4.39 exponent:~$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 6 6 0 4 0 2 -/+ buffers: 3 3 Swap: 34 2 32 GCC/Glibc/other utilities and libraries are so old on this thing that cross compiling for it is difficult at best, and building large packages directly on it take forever. These days, you can get low end pentium's for cheap and/or free, so there's no real point in keeping 386/486 machines around except for the geek factor of it. On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Karl Hiramoto wrote:
for the last few years. I've been running a 486SX-25 with 8M RAM and 100M HD here at my work as a print server. I rescued the box from a pile of garbage. I'm running slackware 3.6 with a 2.0.39 kernel though. Just setup samba and lpd to do the printing. The machine has excellent reliability.
These old boxes work fine for print servers, routers, firewalls,
Old machines work great to for automation of real world things. Set a voltage, read a voltage, set bit, clear bit control applications.
here is the box: #df Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on /dev/hda2 97271 83435 8813 90% /
# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 cpu : 486 model : Cx486 vendor_id : CyrixInstead stepping : unknown, core/bus clock ratio: unknownx fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no fpu : no fpu_exception : no cpuid : no wp : yes flags : bogomips : 4.71
# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 6684 6300 384 4500 1960 2200 -/+ buffers/cache: 2140 4544 Swap: 16432 536 15896
From: Karl Hiramoto <karl@zoop.org>
for the last few years. I've been running a 486SX-25 with 8M RAM and 100M HD here at my work as a print server. I rescued the box from a pile of garbage. I'm running slackware 3.6 with a 2.0.39 kernel though. Just setup samba and lpd to do the printing. The machine has excellent reliability.
These old boxes work fine for print servers, routers, firewalls,
Old machines work great to for automation of real world things. Set a voltage, read a voltage, set bit, clear bit control applications.
You're my kind of guy. This would maybe be better as a reply to someone else, but I'de rather talk to someone who doesn't think 12Mb of RAM is too small to bother with. To those thinking of upgrading old hardware to a newer RedHat: Although I can't find any documentation of the fact anywhere, (the 'hardware requirements' section of the manual talks about disk space but not RAM), I know from hard experience that RH9.0 flatly refuses to install on 32MB and works only after giving you some backtalk on 64MB. It says something like "You lamer, if you won't give me a better machine, I'm going to turn on swapping bfore installing a boot sector, and trash anything you might have had on this disk. Then maybe I'll reboot". Why can't kids these days copy a 12K file in less than 16M? I don't know, but suspect that it has to do with making the install process "easier" by sending a human wave at it. Now nobody can say Overwrite partition table (y/n)? without first installing the X window, GtK, CORBA, Qt, Python, and Perl. -- Keith
Hi all When I first saw that "Old Hardware" juxtaposed to "Keith Wright" I thought I should point out I am still older. And isn't the term "wetware"? Keith Wright wrote:
You're my kind of guy. This would maybe be better as a reply to someone else, but I'de rather talk to someone who doesn't think 12Mb of RAM is too small to bother with.
Keith, I have always wondered how much memory you have on your abacus. I am always amazed you can get emacs to run on it! :-) doug
On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 08:31:25AM -0400, Bob George wrote:
"Chuck Homic" <chuck@vvisions.com> wrote:
Oh, hey... my Debian rant reminded me of something!
I have Debian running on a 486-25 with 12MB of RAM. [...]
Hey, mind if I ask what you use it for? The reason I ask is that I'm on a list dedicated to old PC hardware users, which until recently equated to a base of fanatical DOS holdouts. Slowly though, most are inquiring about Linux, so I'd like to give them some useful info about using Debian as a "modern" distribution on low-resource systems. Unfortunately, I've had to dump most of my old systems, so can't speak from first-hand experience anymore.
Currently it is an excuse to own the domain underpowered.net. It doesn't do much right now, due to lack of storage. My 5G SCSI drive doesn't work with my old old Future Domain controller, so it's running 240M right now. I bought a new interface (urrm... new to me, for a 16-bit ISA SCSI adapter. $1 at eBay, woohoo) and have yet to see if it works better. Anyway, I mostly use it for file transfer, right now. Like if I'm at work and want to send a large file home, I'll drop it there. Or if I want to email friends/family digital photos, but no mail server I know of will accept a 50M attachment, I send a link to http://underpowered.net/whatever In the future I plan to put some of my hackish projects there, expecting that the low bandwidth needs of such things will match the low power available. And of course it runs primary DNS for underpowered.net.
Stephen Darnold, the guy who put Basic Linux together, used to lurk there, and there was often extensive discussion on what could be run on older hardware. Yours sounds like the lower end of the spectrum, so I'm wondering how well it works. Would it work well with Debian specifically as a firewall/gateway? Would you say the benefits of running something current offsets the inconvenience of those delays with installs etc.?
Whoa, this is like, an interview or something. Let's take it 1-by-1: - How can I get on this list? That sounds cool. - I chose Debian for three reasons. 1. familiarity, 2. laziness, 3. the aforementioned 240M hard drive. Since Debian would install a working base system in around 50M, I figured it could conserve well. Currently I'm running DNS, HTTP, FTP, & IMAP with ~100M free for data. I have to erase the HTTP logs of virus attacks on a fairly regular basis to keep that free space, though. ;) - In retrospect, it would be nice to have a package manager with more modest RAM requirements. However, I'll decide this for real when I install the second hard drive. With one HD just for swap, it might not matter so much. - I have no problem saturating my 10Mbit ethernet with a 486-25, so I'm sure it would make a fine firewall/gateway if you don't use it for anything else, and you might have to go easy on the firewall rules. Or it might do fine with fancy firewall rules, who knows? Experience running NAT (for a T1) on similar hardware indicates that that would be no problem. - Although installing packages is a pain (which would be fixed up for $0.50 of RAM, I presume) it just hums along in the interim. I don't know how much RAM the motherboard can take, and I wouldn't know who to buy 30/72-pin SIMMs from. :) Although experience shows I wouldn't have to buy them, they would be given to me if I express interest. (That's a big bonus for old hardware! That's how I got my 5M SCSI drive... it's one of those big full-height Seagate bricks, and fits in no modern case known to man.) - It's a good box just to have hooked up to a wire, but if you have such a thing and you ever find yourself thinking about adding a second 486 to boost resources, you've gone off the deep end. After the novelty value subsides, you have to think about the energy cost. How many services can you provide per watt? How would that compare to a 50W power supply on an old P-100 thinkpad or something? (I'd often thought about using aging laptops as servers, to simplify the UPS situation. I figure a ~$40 car battery plugged into the AC jack could provide backup power for quite a long time, but that's just insanity.) Well, enough rambling. Work to do. -Chuck BTW, speaking of old hardware... some folks on the list might remember my '87 Plymouth Sundance. My brother put in a new engine, and it now runs like da shiznit, and is approaching 210,000 miles. You don't get free parts for a 15 year old car like a 15 year old computer, but there are other advantages.
"Chuck Homic" <chuck@vvisions.com> wrote:
[...] Currently it is an excuse to own the domain underpowered.net.
Hah, great name!
[...] - How can I get on this list? That sounds cool.
Info is at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/survpc/ . Be forewarned however: It's an often contentious place, with a few hard-core DOS holdouts. Not all that it could be, but success stories for using "old stuff" are always welcome.
- I chose Debian for three reasons. 1. familiarity, 2. laziness, 3. the aforementioned 240M hard drive. Since Debian would install a working base system in around 50M, I figured it could conserve well.
That's why I wound up on Debian, although with a *bit* more disk space!
Currently I'm running DNS, HTTP, FTP, & IMAP with ~100M free for data. I have to erase the HTTP logs of virus attacks on a fairly regular basis to keep that free space, though. ;)
Great to hear that it keeps up with all that. A few folks on the list have asked about using various distributions on limited hardware, and I've generally recommended Debian as worth considering. I've installed it on 486en, but usually with 32M or more memory. I wasn't sure about less being practical (recogizing practical depends on the individual).
- In retrospect, it would be nice to have a package manager with more modest RAM requirements. However, I'll decide this for real when I install the second hard drive. With one HD just for swap, it might not matter so much.
Are you using dpkg or apt?
- I have no problem saturating my 10Mbit ethernet with a 486-25, so I'm sure it would make a fine firewall/gateway if you don't use it for anything else, and you might have to go easy on the firewall rules. Or it might do fine with fancy firewall rules, who knows? Experience running NAT (for a T1) on similar hardware indicates that that would be no problem.
I did notice that old NE2000 clone NICs caused my CPU utilization to spike, especially ISA versions. My 486-66 did fine with PCI cards, though that was a couple of kernels ago.
- Although installing packages is a pain (which would be fixed up for $0.50 of RAM, I presume) it just hums along in the interim. I don't know how much RAM the motherboard can take, and I wouldn't know who to buy 30/72-pin SIMMs from. :) Although experience shows I wouldn't have to buy them, they would be given to me if I express interest. (That's a big bonus for old hardware!
Hmm. If I didn't toss 'em before the big move, I might actually HAVE some 4M 30 pin SIMMs. I think I'm out of 72 pin though. I get sad thinking about what I had to toss in Phoenix due to no time prior to my move. I did give away a couple of trunkloads of old stuff.
[...] - It's a good box just to have hooked up to a wire, but if you have such a thing and you ever find yourself thinking about adding a second 486 to boost resources, you've gone off the deep end. After the novelty value subsides, you have to think about the energy cost. How many services can you provide per watt? How would that compare to a 50W power supply on an old P-100 thinkpad or something?
Yeah, I finally started consolidating boxes. A real problem in Phoenix was heat, where my "den" easily ran 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house. 'Course, here that's not quite the issue it was. Still, I don't like waste, and the quiet hum of my current systems is much nicer than the roar of fans I had (as well as the AC working overtime to keep up.)
(I'd often thought about using aging laptops as servers, to simplify the UPS situation. I figure a ~$40 car battery plugged into the AC jack could provide backup power for quite a long time, but that's just insanity.)
I wanted to do the same thing! Quiet, low power, and UPS built-in. Oh, and small too. Thanks for the info! - Bob
participants (6)
-
Bob George -
Chuck Homic -
doug waud -
gboyce＠badbelly.com -
Karl Hiramoto -
Keith Wright