OC by @merci3@lemmy.world
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 😄
Mine was a 386 (AMD IIRC), Slackware 1.0, more than 24h to compile the (0.99pl…) kernel
Have you tried antix? It’s basically Debian for old computers.
Very weird it can’t play videos at all. I installed Linux on a friend’s old <1gb ram laptop and it’s even able to play 480p YouTube.
Also, I wouldn’t run xfce on it, it’s barely lighter than KDE.
Very weird it can’t play videos at all.
I’m sure it can. My guess: either VLC is broken and a different or lighter player would work, or OP is picking the wrong videos (for a really slow CPU, you want older/less compressed codecs—I bet it would do MPEG1 just fine, and might even have acceleration for it).
I was trying to think of the oldest hardware I have run modern Linux on (probably an old Pentium II) when I remembered that I used to run SLS on a 486 (33 MHz, 4 MB of RAM).
If you have enough resources for a GUI there’s too much bloat.
The lowest end hardware you ever ran Linux on, so far!
Intel 486sx at whooping 33MHz, 4Mb RAM, 650 Mb HDD. Was some Red Hat flavor and took a couple of minutes to launch Netscape Navigator.
zsnes & mgba 👀
Are those odd choices? My knowledge of emulators is more outdated than OP’s hardware.
hahaha, hilarious comment :D
nah, not odd at all! it was one of the first things i noticed before i got down to the hardware specs, so it got my attention.
Probably the slowest I’ve used was a 25 MHz(?) sparcstation 1, 500 MB drive, 16 MB RAM. Or some 90’s arm box. Netwinder? iPAQ?
It’s kind of terrible how huge even tiny distributions are these days. But these days there’s cheap low power draw hardware and big storage available that works great and that’s nice. I don’t miss the bad old times.
Mine was a SPARCclassic. I had two of them, one ran OpenBSD as the gateway and I put early Gentoo on the other one. It took days to build initially.
![Just wanted to show off the lowest end hardware I [OOP] ever ran Linux on](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4635a666-6cef-4170-848e-865b931dcfaf.png){kind=link}