Re: Debian on a VERY OLD hardware?
On Mon 05 May 2025 at 22:01:18 (+0200), Rafał Lichwała wrote:
> Is it possible to install Debian on a VERY VERY OLD hardware? If so,
> what "image" should I use?
See below.
> Hardware spec:
>
> CPU: Intel Celeron 400MHz
> RAM: 32MB
> HDD: 6GB
> BIOS year: 1998
> CD-ROM, FDD 1,4MB, RS-232, 1x USB 2.0
I ran woody 3.0 on a Texas Instruments 5000 laptop, Pentium 75MHz
with 8MB memory, but it wouldn't run X 4.1.
With 32MB, you might manage sarge 3.1, though I don't know whether
it being only Celeron will have an influence. IIRC sarge introduced
2.6 kernels as an option. ISTR a lot of modern features were added
with 2.6.
I bought sarge on a 2-DVD set¹. My notes show it ran openoffice.org,
XFree86 4.3 Xinerama 3D, exim4, and python 2.3 (→2.4). The non-US
part of the distribution had just become obsolete, and debian-volatile
appeared.
One advantage of sarge over woody is that there's a debian-installer
rather than just a disk set:
http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/20050317sarge2/images/
versus
http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/
Good luck.
¹ I would have run sarge from 2005–2007 on two machines:
Pentium II (Klamath) with 384MB
Pentium III (Coppermine) with 512MB
Cheers,
David.
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