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raymac46

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Although this article is a few years old, the author complains that Linux and its developers are unwilling to support nearly 20-year-old hardware.

While I hate to see any useful machine recycled or sent to a landfill, I think there are limits to what can be repurposed.

I used to have a 10-year rule for reusing an old system. Lately, I've been able to go over 15 years, provided I can install some sort of SSD and the machine supports 64 bits.

I'm ruling out IDE storage as well. If a machine has a DVD-ROM I can work around the fact it may not boot from a thumbdrive, but I am beginning to question that "feature."

Over the next year or so, we'll see plenty of Skylake and earlier tech that'll become available, so why worry about Pentium IV and early Atom machines? Especially if they are limited to 32 bit memory capacity.

What do you think?

 

 

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securitybreach

Well there are distros that support old hardware but you can't expect someone to continue developing for old hardware that they may or may not still have running. I know you can emulate hardware but at a certain point, it is pointless. A 10 year old machine could run the latest stuff. Reminds me of people complaining that PowerPC is no longer supported as a processor. And when do we limit this? Should a pentinum 1 still be supported?

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Lest anyone think I haven't worked with really old hardware, I installed Linux on a 1995 Fujitsu with a P166, no CD-ROM, no wifi, no Thumbdrive boot, and 80 MB of RAM. Had to use a PCMCIA Ethernet card and floppies. And when I was finished it was totally useless - but fun!

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21 hours ago, raymac46 said:

Lest anyone think I haven't worked with really old hardware, I installed Linux on a 1995 Fujitsu with a P166, no CD-ROM, no wifi, no Thumbdrive boot, and 80 MB of RAM. Had to use a PCMCIA Ethernet card and floppies. And when I was finished it was totally useless - but fun!

Ethernet & floppies?  WOW!  I used PLOP once, just to see how it worked, but realized I'd probably never need to use it, as all my machines were new enough to boot from USB.  But if all you have is a CDROM, or external CDROM, PLOP is an easy tool to workaround that limitation.  But ethernet and floppies....that's impressive....I haven't installed an OS with floppies since probably Win3.1 or Win95. 

 

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The distro I used was called Deli Linux. The basic O/S fit on a couple of floppies and that got me online with the Ethernet card. After that I was able to install a Gui based on Tinyx and a few other basic apps. I did it only for proof of principle.

Here's the laptop.

 

https://www.fujitsu.com/downloads/COMP/fpcap/notebooks/previous/factsheet_lb_735dx.pdf

 

I noticed that it was a P133 CPU not 166. Even older.

Edited by raymac46
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My personal goal is to use Linux to maintain useful hardware that would be otherwise junk when Windows won't support it anymore. I don't think 32 bit machines with 2 GB of RAM are particularly useful - not when 5th generation core i5 laptops are being given away.

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Skylake rigs should be good for quite a few years yet and would be a decent secondhand buy for folks. I have just retired one which was coping very well with some of the latest games and was only struggling with Very High or Ultra settings. For day to day stuff it was fine.

There has to be a cut of for very old hardware but it can still be of use in situations that do not need internet access. Say for instance as a home music machine set up.  😎

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On 10/28/2024 at 9:14 AM, raymac46 said:

Although this article is a few years old, the author complains that Linux and its developers are unwilling to support nearly 20-year-old hardware.

While I hate to see any useful machine recycled or sent to a landfill, I think there are limits to what can be repurposed.

I used to have a 10-year rule for reusing an old system. Lately, I've been able to go over 15 years, provided I can install some sort of SSD and the machine supports 64 bits.

I'm ruling out IDE storage as well. If a machine has a DVD-ROM I can work around the fact it may not boot from a thumbdrive, but I am beginning to question that "feature."

Over the next year or so, we'll see plenty of Skylake and earlier tech that'll become available, so why worry about Pentium IV and early Atom machines? Especially if they are limited to 32 bit memory capacity.

What do you think?

 

 

I'm about to go from a Win 8 rule to a Win 10. There are so many Win 10 devices available for under $100 that is seems pointless to go with anything earlier.

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10 hours ago, raymac46 said:

My personal goal is to use Linux to maintain useful hardware that would be otherwise junk when Windows won't support it anymore. I don't think 32 bit machines with 2 GB of RAM are particularly useful - not when 5th generation core i5 laptops are being given away.

Agreed.  64 bit machines with only 2GB aren't particularly useful either, IMO.  Especially if it can't be upgraded.  In today's world, you need at least 4GB to browse the internet, bare minimum, although 8GB is preferable.  If you don't have at least 4GB, that machine probably shouldn't be on the internet anymore.  Make it a server, or word processor, or e-mail only.  Web surfing will bring 4GB to its knees quickly...you can do it, but it won't be a pleasant experience for very long.

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I have to admit I have a 64-bit Atom Netbook that can't be upgraded beyond 2 GB of RAM. It runs Arch pretty well with LXQt and I can do some rudimentary Web surfing with the Falkon browser. But I wouldn't take it if it were offered to me today.

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My other 3 Linux junker laptops (2012 Thinkpad T430, 2014 Lenovo Flex2-15D, 2015 HP Pavilion) all run Linux so well that I have no reason to look for anything newer. I'll just keep running them. They aren't game machines but they'll do just about anything else.

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11 hours ago, abarbarian said:

Skylake rigs should be good for quite a few years yet and would be a decent secondhand buy for folks.

 

My main rig is Skylake Core i5 6500. Still runs almost perfectly and is plenty fast enough with 16GB RAM. The only thing I plan to upgrade in the foreseeable future is all of the fans, some of them are quite noisy now especially in the graphics card.

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8 hours ago, sunrat said:

 

My main rig is Skylake Core i5 6500. Still runs almost perfectly and is plenty fast enough with 16GB RAM. The only thing I plan to upgrade in the foreseeable future is all of the fans, some of them are quite noisy now especially in the graphics card.

 

I'm sure you've tried cleaning the fans and such

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2 hours ago, securitybreach said:

 

I'm sure you've tried cleaning the fans and such

 

Of course. I do it about once a year and last time was recent. I just checked smartctl on the original drive which showed 47749
Power_On_Hours so the fans have done a lot of work!

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One of my old laptops (a Lenovo Flex2-15D) runs far better under Linux than it ever did under Windows. It has an Atheros Wi-Fi solution, and something was wrong with the Lenovo Windows driver. It would randomly drop Wi-Fi, and you would have to reboot to fix it. The only solution was to disable the onboard Wi-Fi and use a USB dongle.

Since switching to Linux, the laptop's Wi-Fi card has used the ath9k driver, and that works like a charm.

Of course old cheap laptops often have wonky batteries after a few years. You must tear them down to replace the battery - not always a fun job.

 

 

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