What distro to use to resurrect an old Thunderbird rig?

[randomizer]

I have an Athlon T-bird rig I'm trying to resurrect from being terribly slow to usable again. It's been running Windows XP for years with 448MB of RAM but one of the RAM slots has kicked the bucket so I'm down to 384MB now. I have run XP on it with 256MB but I'm sure you can imagine what fun that would be especially after using the same installation for 3 years straight. But I digress.

I am wondering if the newer versions of the common distributions would be too hefty for 384MB RAM and an 850MHz T-bird (it's degrading so I've toned down the overclock). I wouldn't be running KDE because it will probably suck up too much of the precious little RAM I have.

Full specs:

850MHz Athlon T-bird.
384MB PC133
9800 Pro 128MB (overkill to the max but I had a spare card lying around and it was better than the old GF2 MX400 that the PC already had 😛)
Soundblaster Live! 16-bit. I think it's the platinum version.
ASUS A7V (VIA KT133 chipset)
160GB 7200RPM Samsung PATA drive

 

[amdfangirl]

Good airflow? Nope. A/C? Nope. Looks like I'm out of luck 😛 Well I am not one for being afraid of a bit of CPU heat, given I took my E6600 up to 70C idle temps once :lol: I'll undervolt my i7 920 and see if it can handle it, I know it exceeds 80C while encoding video with relatively cool ambient temps of under 24C.

Dat's why you buy CPUs with a low TDP value.

 

[randomizer]

TDP != power consumption.

 

[linux_0]

Yeah

And TDP is often manipulated by the marketing department.

Most consumer PCs are not built to run at 100% utilization 24/7/365, it sucks but it's true sometimes.

A well built server on the other hand is supposed to be engineered to run at 100% utilization 24/7/365 which is why nice servers usually have RAM with error correction, tons of fans that are louder than the space shuttle during launch and high quality components certified to run at higher temperatures and loads.

 

[amdfangirl]

Yeah

And TDP is often manipulated by the marketing department.

I'm just saying you'd have less heat to deal with.

 

[Ijack]

gcc will use 100% of your CPU cores for hours on end while doing this. The thermal stress alone could kill your computer if it's not up to it ( you absolutely have to have good airflow and AC for proper cooling ).

A little over-dramatic I think. Gentoo users regularly compile the kernel and/or large parts of user space without problem. And FreeBSD users will also regularly compile the kernel and most of user space in one go. I've never had any problems doing this on any computer. I must have run Gentoo and/or FreeBSD on at least 20 computers by now. Even an old PPC mac mini doesn't balk at installing Gentoo from scratch.

As an aside, I'm quite surprised to hear Linux enthusiasts say they've never configured (so presumably never compiled) the kernel.

PS. It'll take maybe a day to compile all of Gentoo on the setup you describe, and the CPU isn't running at 100% all of this time. You get bursts of activity interspersed with quite long periods of downloading and running./configure scripts. No way is this measured in weeks.

 

[amdfangirl]

How do you compile?

 

[linux_0]

Less heat is always a good thing

While the CPU gets most of the attention, every single electronic component on the motherboard and inside the computer has it's own environmental limits.

If your CPU is running at 68F or 20C that's great but if your RAM is running at 176F or 80C you'll be in trouble.

Some components cannot exceed 185F or 85C, although lower temperatures can still cause damage over time.

 

[linux_0]

@ijack I've seen sparks fly before, literally!

@amdfangirl

make menuconfig
make
make modules_install

 

[amdfangirl]

Is it auto-compile?

 

[linux_0]

@ijack

I wasn't talking about Gentoo or LFS specifically, I was saying if you try to compile the 10,000 packages that the various distributions usually offer pre-compiled on an older system such as the one randomizer has, it would take a very long time.

The 2.6.x kernel alone can take 20-40 minutes to compile depending on your configuration options and your hardware.

Apache can take 20 minutes to several hours depending on what you're doing to it and how many times you mess it up 😉

 

[linux_0]

Is it auto-compile?

Well... make does all the hard work for you, so you don't have to gcc each file by hand

Without make, it would be a nightmare to compile.

By my count 2.6.30.4 has 12073 .c files and 10598 .h files.

 

[Ijack]

How do you compile?

If that was directed at me, just the normal means for the distros in question. "emerge --update" for Gentoo, "make buildworld" for FreeBSD.

 

[randomizer]

As an aside, I'm quite surprised to hear Linux enthusiasts say they've never configured (so presumably never compiled) the kernel.

I'm not a Linux enthusiast, I don't even run Linux on my current system (I had a basic setup on my old rig). I haven't found the initiative to dive into the setup of it yet. The problem for me is finding a need or use for it other than just to play around with.

Without make, it would be a nightmare to compile.

By my count 2.6.30.4 has 12073 .c files and 10598 .h files.

No kidding!

 

[Ijack]

@ijackThe 2.6.x kernel alone can take 20-40 minutes to compile depending on your configuration options and your hardware.

That would be on a severely limited machine, or a severely badly configured kernel. The main thing, I find, that takes time compiling the kernel is all the modules. But the point about a custom kernel is that you don't enable modules for 123 ethernet cards, just the one that you actually have. On a modern PC the kernel takes a few minutes to compile, on my PPC Mac Mini (the slowest machine I use) maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Most drivers I'll compile into the kernel, with just a handful of modules.

 

[Ijack]

By my count 2.6.30.4 has 12073 .c files and 10598 .h files.

But, realistically, you don't even use half of those files. Most of them are for hardware, or filesystems, or networking options, that you won't be creating modules for. But you do have to configure the kernel to remove all those unwanted drivers.

 

[Ijack]

I'm not a Linux enthusiast, I don't even run Linux on my current system (I had a basic setup on my old rig). I haven't found the initiative to dive into the setup of it yet. The problem for me is finding a need or use for it other than just to play around with.



No kidding!

Fair enough. In that case you certainly won't want to be looking at Gentoo!

 

[randomizer]

Out of interest, what size could you cut a typical Ubuntu installation down to by compiling it yourself? I think Ubuntu is about 2-4GB or something at the moment.

 

[randomizer]

Fair enough. In that case you certainly won't want to be looking at Gentoo!

Only Gentoo I've used was a pre-compiled version resurrecting a PPC Powerbook G4, which subsequently had the HDD fail.

 

[linux_0]

Well that's what make menuconfig is for

A n00b might be lost inside the make menuconfig or make xconfig for several hours.

A pro could do it in 30 seconds or a few minutes or no time at all if you have a .config already 😀

If you compile a generic kernel the way redhat and ubuntu might, it could take a long time because they do include 500 ethernet cards and 2,000 dohickey drivers.

If you compile an optimized kernel for your system with only a couple of drivers included it might get done in 8minutes.

 

[linux_0]

Out of interest, what size could you cut a typical Ubuntu installation down to by compiling it yourself? I think Ubuntu is about 2-4GB or something at the moment.

Good question, who knows

Ubuntu desktop is about 2-4GB.

Ubuntu server is less, about 1GB IIRC, maybe less.

Debian can be even less than ubuntu server.

About 15 years ago you could get a barebones linux distribution installed if you had about 100MB of disk space ( not RAM, disk space ).

With ucLinux you can get it well below 100MB ( 8-32MB IIRC ) but you can't do that much with it, all you get is busybox and a couple of tools.

 

[randomizer]

I should try it 😀 Although working out which drivers are which and which drivers I need would probably take me years :lol:

 

[linux_0]

A default Ubuntu desktop install will fit on a 4GB SD card or SSD.

It will not fit onto a 2GB SD card, usb flash drive or SSD. You'd have to whip out a turbocharged swiss army chainsaw to get it to fit 😉

Haven't tried the alternate desktop but ubuntu server should fit on a 2GB device.

 

[linux_0]

I should try it 😀 Although working out which drivers are which and which drivers I need would probably take me years :lol:

:lol:

I'm sure we could arrange to have a .config and a pci network card smuggled over to you 😉

Let's just hope Australian customs doesn't read this forum.

 

[randomizer]

What is the earliest kernel version which supports all 8 threads of the i7? Alongside possibly compiling a distro on it I want to compare the time to encode some video with Handbrake on Windows to Linux. I don't know if I should expect any noticeable difference (it's still x264), but perhaps the file system difference might show some improvement/detriment.

 

[linux_0]

I don't know about the i7 but on the P4 Hyper-Threading could actually cost you about 5-10% in lost performance.

There was also talk that Hyper-Threading created some major security issues at the hardware level.