Ran an ISP on a Pentium 90 and a few 486s. Linux and FreeBSD!
this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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the theme tricked me into thinking this is Cinnamon
Pfft, what no LXDE
even better LXQT
Stories from the "good" old days running Linux on a 386 machine with 4 MB or less of memory aside, in the present day it's still perfectly normal to run Linux on a much weaker machine as a server - you can just rent a the cheapest VPS you can find (which nowadays will have 128 MB, maybe 256MB, and definitelly only give you a single core) and install it there.
Of course, it won't be something with X-Windows or Wayland, much less stuff like LibreOffice.
I think the server distribution of Ubunto might fit such a VPS, though there are server-specific Linux distros that will for sure fit and if everything fails TinyCore Linux will fit in a potato.
I current have a server like that using AlmaLinux on a VPS with less than 1GB in memory, which is used only as a Git repository and that machine is overkill for it (it's the lowest end VPS with enough storage space for a Git repository big enough for the projects I'm working on, so judging by the server management interface and linux meminfo, that machine's CPU power and memory are in practice far more than needed).
If you're willing to live with a command line interface, you can run Linux on $50 worth of hardware.
only give you a single core
And boy would that core be shitty and over-provisioned.
Those Tualatin core CPUs were absolutely fantastic. They doubled them and made the Core2. I had one running for 10+ years. I don't know what it was about the bios but it was the fastest boot PC I ever built.
Ubuntu 12 on an Intel atom 270m with an nvidia chip set with 125mb ram lol
I had slackware on my 386DX 40. 4mb ram. It was kinda short-lived. I never got my modem working. I got a book, paged thought it. Learning shit was hard in the 90's Internet.
I got my modem working in Slackware in 1997 - but the PPP driver (equivalent of WinSock - which worked in Windows quite well at the time) would only work during the first boot of the system. After a reboot, PPP would never return, and the best I got out of the internet about it at the time (mostly using my Windows PC) was "real men connect to the internet through ethernet."
Between that an the useless (unless you enjoy frustration) sound drivers, I declared Linux "not ready for prime time," and left it to others until starting back in via Cygwin in 2003, then Gentoo (for 64 bit access you couldn't get any other way) in 2005.
Yeah I did another couple of false starts over the next couple of years. This time at different jobs. I finally made friends with Redhat on a laptop with Enlightenment WM. I managed to stay Linux in the desktop for the next 14 years. KDE, Gnome , switch to Ubuntu when Red hat decided to go and split out the door, went back to Fedora when Cannocial had their bad boy phase. OSX lured me away and 2015 I think it was. Super disappointed with the level of control I had over the OS, I went back to Windows for WSL. Christian on that until Debian got their shit back together (nonfree). Eventually slid into NixOS, I don't know if it's as painful as slack where I was but it certainly feels like it, and I kind of missed that.
Similar story but I just installed slackware on one of the University PCs (they just had a handful of PCs in the general computer room for the students and nobody actually watched over us) since I did not have a PC yet (only had a ZX Spectrum at the timback then).
Trying to get X-Windows to work in Slackware was interesting, to say the least: back then you had to manually create your own video timings configuration file to get the graphics to work - which means defining the video mode at the very low level, such as configuring the number of video clock cycles between end-of-line-drawing and horizontal-retrace - and fortunatelly I didn't actually blow up any monitor (which was possible if you did the configuration wrong).
At least we had some access to the Internet (most things were blocked but we had Usenet and e-email and one could use FTPmail gateways to download stuff from remote servers) via Ethernet, so that part was easy.
Anyways, my first reaction looking at the OP's post was like: yeah, if they're running X it's probably a too powerfull machine.
My favorite part of the first configuration of x back then, you screw with the conf for ages, manage to get a viable video mode set, startx for the billionth time... gray screen, mouse cursor... Overflowingly happy... Wait, now what? No program manager, no apps, no terminal, No exit, no shutdown. What's a window manager? The least apparent thing in the world being to switch consoles , export a display variable, and start an xtern in the video console.
We worked so hard for every little thing.
Yeah, but at least we knew how to switch consoles.
I bet that most Linux users nowadays don't event know the CTRL+ALT+Fx shortcuts to switch console.
Can't say that the old days were really "good" compared to what we had now, but there was definitelly a lot of satisfaction in step by step getting the system to work.
Oh God no, You're 100% correct on all that. We were living through endorphins and we now have something in between nostalgia and Stockholm syndrome for the old days.
Older machines running Xfce brings me joy.
Xfce on Debian is my preferred flavor these days - regardless of machine power.
Up 'til 2022 or 2023 company I work for used Pentium 4 at POS PCs running ancient openSUSE. They would be still in service if it weren't for leaking/swollen caps on most motherboards. Pure power wasn't really there, but it was plenty enough to run that checkout software...
Yes the laptop CPU and RAM may be upgradeable but have you considered the parts availability? Considering its a 32bit CPU
Yeah, that's what I'm researching right now.. I hope I can at least make it useable enough for web browsing
2GB of RAM? Low?
Were you born after the year 2000?
Haha, I've been used to 4gb ram minimum for most of my life π
Lmao, I've ran Linux on an eeePC with 1GB RAM and 900MHz Intel Atom. Compiling gcc & glibc could take hours.
Edit: RPi3 still got only 1GB, BeagleBone Black even got 512MB, don't forget RPi0
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Iβm pretty certain the first computer I installed Linux on was a Pentium 75 with 4MB of RAM. I know I ran it on some 486s booting off floppys at work. We were at 10,000 feet and couldnβt trust the lifespan of spinning rust.
Hell yeah! Love seeing old hardware like this still running a modern OS.
With Linux, if your hardware is a decade old, you've barely even reached middle-age.
Meanwhile Windows 11 won't even allow an official install on hardware that's 4-5 years old.
Long live Linux & FOSS β
I think my lowest was a 33 MHz 486sx (maybe DX) with 8MB of RAM.
I wouldn't want to try it today though.
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thats my current laptop
Edit: im exagerating but I really have 20-yr 32-bit Dell laptops running minimal debian linux. and my current laptop is 10+ yrs old Lenovo which I already replaced its screen, rams, keyboard, bluetooth, usb ports... and it's still working flawlessly for daily tasks, video/music editing, coding and programming, internet browsing :D
https://shop.hak5.org/products/shark-jack technically runs openwrt.
SoC: 580MHz MediaTek MT7628 mips CPU
Memory: 64 MB DDR2 RAM, 64 MB SPI Flash
I rushed to the comments when I saw a 1.6ghz CPU being called low end but I see OPs already been dealt with. I remember the first ever 1ghz CPU being an overclocked nitrogen cooled AMD Athlon. Me and my mates were all talking about it when it happened.
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2 gigs of ram ? You probably can have an emulation station up to PS1 with this hardware.
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Are you using systemd? Because 317 MB of RAM is really low for a normal Debian installation with XFce. At my mom's 2 GB ram laptop, it uses 850 MB on a cold boot.
850 sounds crazy. maybe you forgot to subtract cached memory?
It is because it is 32 bit. You can run a 32 bit distro on your machine too if you really want.
You can get a full Trinity desktop on Q4OS in 130 MB of RAM (32 bit edition).
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I booted Buildroot with kernel 5.17 on a Pentium II laptop off a CD I burned once - I needed to dump a drive once and that was the only hardware I had on hand that could dump 2.5β IDE drives and had a working CD drive so I could boot something other than the operating system installed on the drive.
Those are better specs than what I used throughout college (an Asus Eee PC running Debian with Xfce and Openbox). Not a powerful machine, but I absolutely loved that thing.
Nice
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