A friend has an old Pentium-133 laptop with 32MB of memory and a 1.3 GB hard disk that he wants to use as a web server for a very small community. Will CentOS (or any other RHEL derived distribution for that matter) install and run with acceptable performance on such a system, or will a specialized distribution like Damn Small Linux be a better choice? In this case, disk space is not a big concern so getting the smallest footprint is not a high priority. Alfred
On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 07:14 -0400, Alfred von Campe wrote:> A friend has an old Pentium-133 laptop with 32MB of memory and a 1.3 GB > hard disk that he wants to use as a web server for a very small > community. Will CentOS (or any other RHEL derived distribution for > that matter) install and run with acceptable performance on such a > system, or will a specialized distribution like Damn Small Linux be a > better choice? In this case, disk space is not a big concern so > getting the smallest footprint is not a high priority.There's too little memory to even get CentOS installed. You might want to take a look at RULE if you want a RH-derived distro. -- Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazquez at ivazquez.net> http://fedora.ivazquez.net/ gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-key 38028b72 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20050504/ca19632d/attachment-0004.sig>
Alfred von Campe wrote:> A friend has an old Pentium-133 laptop with 32MB of memory and a 1.3 GB > hard disk that he wants to use as a web server for a very small > community. Will CentOS (or any other RHEL derived distribution for that > matter) install and run with acceptable performance on such a system, or > will a specialized distribution like Damn Small Linux be a better > choice? In this case, disk space is not a big concern so getting the > smallest footprint is not a high priority.Either put more memory, or go with some older distribution. CentOS 3.x might run on it, not sure what are memory requirements for it. RHEL 2.x would run even better. 64MB should be more that enough for CentOS4 as long as you use it as dedicated plain web server (no fancy stuff, no PHP, no databases, only static content). SSL would slow down things somewhat, but would be acceptable. If you install only basic packages (no X, no additional utilities, no development packages) the installation will take up somewhere around 500MB. -- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7
Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith@ieee.org>
2005-May-04 17:58 UTC
[CentOS] Running CentOS on very old hardware
Pre-i686 (PPro-P4, K6/Athlon, Cyrix M2/C3, WinChip2?) architectures take issue some applications. E.g., Red Hat, among other distros, have not bothered with pre-i686 NPTL support. There are better distros for i486 (K5, Cyrix Mx/M1, WinChip) or i586 (exactly Pentium-only) architectures than anything Fedora Core based (RHEL), SuSE Linux based (SLES/NOES), Mandrake Linux or similarly based. Although Cobind Linux is supposedly a rebuild of Fedora for older systems. And I've found it runs XFCE pretty good on as little as 48MB. I know Alan Cox used to boast he ran Fedora Core 2 (same core/packages as RHEL4) with XFCE on as little as 48MB on a WinChip2 225MHz (not sure if the IDT Centaur WinChip2 was i486 or i686 ISA compatible though). -----Original Message----- From: Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca> Sent: May 4, 2005 10:09 AM To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Running CentOS on very old hardware Alfred von Campe wrote:> A friend has an old Pentium-133 laptop with 32MB of memory and a 1.3 GB > hard disk that he wants to use as a web server for a very small > community. Will CentOS (or any other RHEL derived distribution for that > matter) install and run with acceptable performance on such a system, or > will a specialized distribution like Damn Small Linux be a better > choice? In this case, disk space is not a big concern so getting the > smallest footprint is not a high priority.Either put more memory, or go with some older distribution. CentOS 3.x might run on it, not sure what are memory requirements for it. RHEL 2.x would run even better. 64MB should be more that enough for CentOS4 as long as you use it as dedicated plain web server (no fancy stuff, no PHP, no databases, only static content). SSL would slow down things somewhat, but would be acceptable. If you install only basic packages (no X, no additional utilities, no development packages) the installation will take up somewhere around 500MB. -- Aleksandar Milivojevic <amilivojevic at pbl.ca> Pollard Banknote Limited Systems Administrator 1499 Buffalo Place Tel: (204) 474-2323 ext 276 Winnipeg, MB R3T 1L7 _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS at centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos -- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
Just my $.02 - there are more appropriate distros that can do what you are asking. Check out: DSL Linux http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/index.html "Run light enough to power a 486DX with 16MB of Ram" Vecor Linux http://www.vectorlinux.com/ "a distribution that only reguires 175 megs of disk space for full install and a system with 16MB of RAM" On Wed, 2005-05-04 at 07:14 -0400, Alfred von Campe wrote:> A friend has an old Pentium-133 laptop with 32MB of memory and a 1.3 GB > hard disk that he wants to use as a web server for a very small > community. Will CentOS (or any other RHEL derived distribution for > that matter) install and run with acceptable performance on such a > system, or will a specialized distribution like Damn Small Linux be a > better choice? In this case, disk space is not a big concern so > getting the smallest footprint is not a high priority. > > Alfred > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos >
Alfred von Campe wrote:> A friend has an old Pentium-133 laptop with 32MB of memory and a 1.3 GB > hard disk that he wants to use as a web server for a very small > community. Will CentOS (or any other RHEL derived distribution for that > matter) install and run with acceptable performance on such a system, or > will a specialized distribution like Damn Small Linux be a better > choice? In this case, disk space is not a big concern so getting the > smallest footprint is not a high priority. > > AlfredI would worry about the RAM. I am running my family server on a PII 266 with 256 of ram. No issues. I have a backup/test server which is a 133 with 64 of ram. No GUI on either of these systems though. Doug