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- cross-posted to:
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on ssd upgrades:
upgrade usually costs less than 30 dollars for a 256GB SATA drive.
how much for the time machine to go back to last summer?
I have to laugh at the guide calling itself “complete.”
Yes, it’s got a lot of useful info. Yes, someone reading it can learn a lot about what to do with older computers and what to expect from distros.
But there is so much more that the guide doesn’t cover, haha
Meanwhile, the textbooks we spend months to barely understand only claim to be the introduction
There are four version of x86_64: v1, v2, v3, and v4.
RHEL 9 dropped support for anything prior to v3. That means RockyLinux doesn’t cover it, either. AlmaLinux has support for v2 in version 10, but there’s no way of knowing how long that will last.
Some binary packages are starting to drop support for earlier version. The latest numpy out of pip will not work on a v1 machine. You can sometimes use the system package manager’s numpy to work around it, or constrain pip to use an older numpy. I don’t know what else is lurking out there.
If you’ve got visions of taking a really old computer that you happened to max out on RAM back in the day and bringing it back to life there are surprises waiting for you.
After a quick skim of the article, it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but the author 1. only worked with a single Intel CPU (no AMD devices at all) and 2. could do with a wider knowledge of niche distros.
TCL runs fine on 192MB of RAM and a PII. But any modern webpage brings it all to a screeching halt.
TCL?
Tiny Core Linux
Thanks
Tiny Core http://tinycorelinux.net/
Thanks, I didn’t know about that one
I still have some fedora 6 discs floating around. those should be fine to use, right?
You jest, but Fedora’s probably one of the worst distros you could use an old version of. They’re practically a rolling release with how short the support window for each version is. Plus, they have a very “march of progress” mentality compared to something like Debian.
Is ext4rat still a thing? That would be a nice tip for anyone running the system on hdds
What’s ext4rat? Web searches don’t turn anything up and I must have missed out on whatever it is, or was. (Which wouldn’t be the first time.)
I did find a Python script called ext4ract which apparently pulls files out of an ext4 filesystem, but it doesn’t seem to be a hugely well-known tool and I’m not sure how it’s relevant here.
It’s a tool that allowed to put all the files read during boot time in a sequential order in the hdd, minimizing the read time, so the device booted much faster.
It’s this one: https://e4rat.sourceforge.net/
Note: I searched using duckduckgo and found it normally
DuckDuckGo is my default engine. It assumed I meant “extract” and gave me a dictionary definition along with links to download WinZip and WinRAR. When I told it I actually meant what I typed, it put it in quotes and returned no results.
It was not obvious that I should have omitted the X and the T.
What I apparently didn’t do was try Google afterwards, and I’m a little disturbed that I didn’t. Adding !g to the search in DDG is usually the first thing I do when it can’t find anything, but my browser history suggests I didn’t do that.
Only now after reading your comment that I realized it’s e4rat, and not ext4rat lol. I could swear I saw it written as ext4rat somewhere some years ago!
But anyway, I used ddg too, and it gave me that link among the first results, which is weird. I thought their search was reproducible, but turns out it’s not, just like google…
it’s as old and out-of-date as the systems you’d be wanting to use it on.
I’d rather use Haiku on such horrible hardware if it’s hardware compatible and I had no other hardware choice. Newer computers can do things far more efficiently, and smart phones costing ~$100 are safer for banking and often more capable otherwise. People try to make Linux the solution to everything when it’s horrible for most things. -It’s cultish behavior.
The biggest problem with Haiku is that it has practically no security. It runs everything as root, it doesn’t have user accounts, and the only password it supports is for a screensaver screen locker. I think it has potential, but its security model is completely unacceptable for an online OS in 2026.
Terry Davis has a funny video criticism about Linux and the layers of security for a home or personal OS.
Had me in the first half, lost me in the second.
Yep, and there are leaner, better Linux distros as well. Void Linux outperforms all of the author’s picks on older hardware, and there are also the BSDs to consider. Hell, even MX Linux (based on antiX) would be better than anything Ubuntu based.
