Linux Distributions You Can Rely on for Your Ancient 32-Bit Computer | Hacker News Reader

Linux Distributions You Can Rely on for Your Ancient 32-Bit Computer

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61 pointsmsndr40 comments

As people noted, odd Slackware was not listed.

But, for 32 bit systems, right now I believe you are probably better of using NetBSD or OpenBSD. Both systems do not have the 2038 problem and use far less resources.

Granted Linux is working on 2038, but I think it is not 100% and only in 5.6+ (IIRC).

Also with the wayland push in Linux, I am not sure how well wayland will work on 32 bit systems with limited memory.

It's still 18 years to 2038 though. If unix time is my biggest problem in 2038, I'll be very, very happy.

/me looks at my stack of 18 year old computers I want to run linux on.

True, but some people may need to calculate date/times beyond 2038, there probably are other methods of doing that, but if you use time_t it would not be supported.

Linux completed 2038 work. Arnd Bergmann of Linaro completed it for 5.10.

I recently went with 32bit OpenBSD and Alpine Linux while revamping a small collection of Atom & Pentium M netbooks (the Toshiba Portege was as thin/light as the Macbook Air) after replacing the spinny disks for SSDs.

Alpine is great because you can keep your home dirs, some configuration & packages etc. on an encrypted thumb drive that can be swapped between computers.

It's like an author using an old typewriter to focus, can't use Chrome (too slow) but NetSurf is great for occasional HN and reference material browsing.

All I really need is a shell, Vim, i3, Python and a compiler... reminds me of the Minix days - just you, an editor and a C compiler without any distractions.

What's "ancient"/"vintage" nowadays? I thought the common meaning was "ceased to be commonly used before I was born". Do we really have people young enough here that were born after 32-bit computers ceased to be commonly available on the market? Wasn't that like just 10 years ago?

Vintage is anything more than 20 y/o, so cassette tapes are vintage.

I wouldn’t really consider 32 bit vintage.

Right, currently 32-bit is only obsolete and unsupported. It'll be a while longer for it to be coveted as vintage.

There are multiple common meanings, none of which (for me) defining it as "before I existed". Nor is it a set time.

iPhone 5c is vintage at nine years old, defined by Apple.

When was the last 32 bit x86 processor manufactured? AMD/Intel, the only two worth really discussing due to volume, have made 64-bit processors for 15 years or so. In computing terms, that is an age.

> When was the last 32 bit x86 processor manufactured?

You could still buy brand-new 32-bit netbooks from BestBuy 10 years ago.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100817144812/http://www.bestbu...

Some 32-bit only intel atom still show up sometimes.

Intel Atom with _32-bit EFI_ is relatively common, but these will in fact run a full 64-bit OS (not windows though). Early Intel Atom actually had no 64 bit support whatsoever, but I'm not sure if that kind of hardware still gets manufactured.

For me, this means my Eden 5000 with a fanless C3 processor continues to be my longest running computer that sees continual usage for source code control. I think 2002/2003? CPU is 32-bit, so still chugging along with Gentoo these days.

https://i.imgur.com/W1BTU4u.jpg

And if you need an up-to-date Debian unstable for more exotic architectures, we have support for that in Debian Ports:

> https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/snapshots/2020-10-1...

> https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/ports/debian-installer/20...

Just be warned that the incorporation of Rust into projects like librsvg means that some older instruction sets (specifically that lack SSE and SSE2, if I recall) are no longer supported:

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/14441

As a consequence of this issue, I had to manually downgrade librsvg on a older machine in order to get Buster functional.

If the librsvg package in Debian i386 crashes with SIGILL on a Pentium II or Pentium III, it’s a baseline violation and should be reported as a bug against src:librsvg with severity serious.

What you describe here is a Debian Policy violation.

tbf. I still hope that at some point in time the i386 code will be completly removed in linux, even on debian. microsoft won't remove such code, they even keep some 16-bit stuff in windows even if it just does not work anymore.

I mean yeah it's cool to run an old machine with top up to date linux, but at some point we still should move on.

I completely understand the desire to use the newer instructions and get the most performance possible out of the latest hardware, but we also should make it a priority to keep a portable C codepath in all of these libraries. Otherwise we’re going to find there are only two architectures left in the world because none of the software runs on anything else.

There is a clean codepath, this is about setting the minimum CPU required for x86 -- there is a trade-off, we could make executables that will run on a 386, but it would be slow (particularly if multithreaded) due to later added instructions. Also, such old systems are little tested.

> As a consequence of this issue, I had to manually downgrade librsvg on a older machine in order to get Buster functional.

How old is your hardware? AIUI, this should only affect Pentium Pro to Pentium III hardware, which is often limited by other factors anyway (particularly RAM). Even old netbook CPU's ought to support SSE2.

In fact, that bug report was closed with a suggestion to use i586 as a build target if you have an early i686 machine - would that be satisfactory for your use case?

I see Puppy Linux is also still going, but they need to sort out their website's HTTPS.

http://puppylinux.com/ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_Linux

Surprised they didn't mention OpenWRT. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/installation/openwrt_x86

Good to know! I have a few old 32-bit laptops in my collection, and I thought my only options at this point were FreeDOS or one of the BSDs.

I needed a new OS for my old 32-bit Intel MacBook because its 32-bit Lubuntu is expiring in few months. I tried 32-bit Debian, but the installation memory stick crashed during boot. :(

So, I actually decided to install FreeBSD on it. :) It works well for my use case, which is a simple file server without any GUI. I love how simple FreeBSD is compared to Linux distros.

Haiku is another possibility - it runs well on my 701 4G eeePC:

https://www.haiku-os.org

Thanks for the idea. I have a 701 and was thinking about what distro install but you solved it for me.

32 bits is now considered _ancient_? Oh, man, I remember 8-bit computers...

Those things are prehistoric! And mainframes would be antediluvian even (they were almost killed by the flood of the microprocessors).

I wonder what the top 32 bit computer is now-a-days... I bet it is ARM 32 bit rather than Intel 32 bit.

Last time I looked 32 bit ARM linux was doing very well :-)

It's doing Ok, not very well. It seems to be 2nd class citizen at best. Some applications/libraries were never ported, e.g. there's no CLISP, scsh or multi-threading support for SBCL (there is such for CCL).

Nice to see Q4OS getting some love

It's a little rough around the edges, but Trinity works nicely on something with low RAM

There's also EXE GNU/Linux if you want Trinity without systemd (it's based on Devuan):

http://exegnulinux.net

Interesting - I've been meaning to try it on an old Pi

It's strange they do not mention Slackware.

32bit Centos 7 will be supported till June 2024.

i love antiX.. it's the swansong OS of a couple of my old computers, giving them life. i like the approach of it. it takes a bit to adjust to, to the way it works, but then there's a warm feeling to it which is nice.

I use archlinux32 https://archlinux32.org/ for my old laptop. The laptop is 13 years old and still running quite well.

I was bit by Arch Linux dropping 32-bit support, running it on a couple low-end routers and an old netbook.

There's a community effort to keep it going over at Arch Linux 32 https://archlinux32.org/ but based on the activity, it seems they were probably right that very few people were still running Arch on 32 bit systems.

I personally run Gentoo on my ancient Acer Aspire One, because I'm a little crazy, and run it on everything: my desktop, raspberry pi's, an old Surface tablet. I want to install it onto a Pine-Phone next! It's wide architecture support is one of my favorite features, among many. That said, I clicked this article with no expectations of seeing it in the list, and was really surprised when it was (NixOS too :p).

Not that Gentoo isn't great for old or otherwise underpowered hardware, it absolutely is, but.. the build times! It'd be a real pain to keep things up to date without the system I've fallen into.

I run all these older systems thanks to virtual (sometimes cross-architecture) binary package hosts on my beefy PC, and automating the process of syncing world files, use flags, binpkgs, etc. Any of my gentoo machines can automatically sync their settings with their package host, trigger builds of updated packages, and download the resulting binaries, all of which is packaged into a simple-to-run update script. In the future, I hope to add another script which parses portage output and just sends the package list to the binhost, which can then build them one-shot mode and not worry about keeping world lists and profiles synced up, just use-flags and repo trees.

Anyways, simple to run now, but getting here was a long, gradual process, which I didn't start until I was already doing these steps, intermittently, by hand for several devices.

The alternatives include: - Compiling everything locally on my netbooks and such, which would take an absurdly inconvenient amount of time (if none of the builds fail for lack of memory) on a regular basis. - Actually building the system on my PC, and then moving the drive to the under powered device, which may need to involve a VM if cross-architecture (like this gem https://youtu.be/4qSziR6sD8Q) - distcc, which (a.) would still be awfully slow no matter how many cores I get behind it because of preprocessing work, and (b.) I actually do run distcc servers alongside the package hosts, mostly just for kernel builds.

Digression: I've only automated the steps needed for basic distcc distribution of kernel builds (without -pump), and although it helps a little, I still prefer to manually sync the kernel src and it's config with the binhost and build the kernel image there, which I'll build a smoother system for in the future.

Point being, I love Gentoo, and as much of a hassle as this might sound, I do this! It is worth it to me. (I also run all these systems LTO, because I'm just full of myself: I justify it by arguing that the, kind of diminishing-returns-esque, performance advances of Gentoo which can usually be disregarded as inconsequential make the most difference, if any, on underpowered devices.)

But.. I don't know that I'd recommended anyone else do this. It's been a lot of work. I don't know what it would be like if I just built all my packages locally, but I've tried building gcc updates on my netbook, god forbid I try to built Firefox (which to be fair is available as a bin in the repos). I think I'd rather just stop updating (not an option!). I hope that someday the scripts I'm maintaining to keep this all working will be streamlined enough that I can share them with pride, and recommended everyone run gentoo on their old laptops and such, but atm they rely too heavily on my personal infrastructure.

By all means, I love this distro and I hope everyone tries it. Don't be scared off by me, I'm crazy, and the complexity of my system only exists because I do this to myself. For one machine, even if it's only decently powerful (like an older but 64-bit laptop), Gentoo might be a solid choice, and can be a great experience. But know what building everything locally entails, and what other options are available.

(I don't know who I'm talking to, no "beginner" seems to be seriously planning on installing gentoo on underpowered hardware based on this article, and folks who are seem to be like me, and know what they want and why their doing it; guess I'm just sharing :p)

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