Re: Old Computers
On Jun 1, 2015, at 5:56 PM, Jose Martinez <jomartinez812@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey guys,
> I'm about to be blessed with several old PC computers. By old I mean that some of them will not even have CDROM drives on them. I will probably tear them all down, mix-and-match parts and make the best system(s) I can from those parts. This is something I've done before, so the technical aspects are not a problem. I expect to use the resulting system(s) solely for "play" purposes to experiment with and delve into the depths of the system programming primarily for educational purposes. If any of you remember Scotty from the original Star Trek series and how he spent his off/vacation time pouring over tech manuals and playing with gadgets, well that's me!
>
> The question is, will jessie install and run on these old systems? If not, can I still get a debian distro that will? I expect that the processors on at least one of them will be at least i386 or better, so I also expect that jessie will install and run, but that my main problem will be with drivers for the legacy peripherals.
>
> I just can't find it within me to throw out what is, other than being old, a good usable computer system.
>
> I appreciate any information y'all can send my way.
Welcome to the club, Jose! I do the same sort of thing for old Macintosh PowerPC machines. It’s actually kind of fun… (for certain definitions of “fun” <-: )
You may find a distro targeted at so called “embedded” computers that will run on your hardware. Do a Google search for “debian linux embedded x86”. That seems to have some useful pointers.
Top of the list is “emdebian”. The Emdebian page says:
> Embedded_Debian
>
> Change of status
> As of July 2014, Emdebian Grip stopped receiving updates to the unstable-grip distribution. Updates to the jessie-grip suite stopped some months before that. The last stable release of Emdebian Grip was 3.1 based on Debian GNU/Linux 7.1 Wheezy.
> There will be no further updates of Emdebian Grip.
> This information is retained for historical purposes but can be removed when wheezy is finally removed from the Debian mirrors (which will happen at some point before the next stable release after Debian Jessie 8.0).
So you can at least get a version of Wheezy that might work on your hardware. Jessie looks to be not in the cards. I guess porting Systemd to minimal hardware was just too hard… )-:
A little further down the list is Voyage Linux, which is a Debian derivative. I’ve used Voyage. Some of the things they do to make it fit in a very small footprint are quite creative! I learned a lot when I was doing that work.
Good luck, and have lots of fun!
Rick
Reply to: