Comment by guessbest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guessbest | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have a laptop from 2009 or 2010 running at 800 mhz with a 32 bit CPU. It has to run an older version of Ubuntu (18.04) because nothing supports it nowadays. Even 32 bit packages are hard to get. I see no reason to use antiX or other esoteric distros since ubuntu runs fine on it and supports the hardware. I doubt antiX supports more hardware.

Someone else recommended it here, but I don't see the advantages over a robust package repository like ubuntu 18 or a minimal ram only distro like puppylinux. https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/antix.html

Funny enough I got puppylinux running from a dos (windows) partition and running out of RAM on just 2gb on a Toshiba Portage m200. I've even got Windows XP Tablet edition running on SSD, but it can't really connect to much online due to the TLS limitations. And newer versions of the linux kernel don't support the wireless chipset. It is also difficult putting an old non-PAE kernel into a newer distro.

TLS really killed the utility of a lot of older computers with regards to using the "modern internet".

I have an old Dell with a 32-bit 2.33 Ghz T2700. Linux fully supports the GPU, and no issues with missing 32-bit packages on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's a spare browsing / retro gaming machine hooked up to the TV in the guest room. For gaming, it runs everything from arcade MAME to Mario Kart 64 like a champ. For browsing, it's not speedy but not bad on heavy HTML sites like gmail/youtube.

I agree antiX was a poor choice. No issue with PAE kernel on Tumbleweed i686. If OpenSUSE ever drops x86 support, there's always Debian or Arch 32 (if I want to stick with a rolling distro).

I still have a tablet PC from 2005 in rotation, and the lack of 32-bit apps is definitely a killer, but not terrible.

My original reason for reviving it was for use as a whiteboard in Zoom calls, but there's no 32-bit Zoom app - and I'm sure screen sharing while decoding 15 people's video would've been out of the question anyway. So I run a VNC server on it, and share out a VNC session from my work laptop instead.

I've also hit the issue where I've had to compile software for x86 using modern build toolchains. It takes forever, and more often than not, I run out of RAM (only 1GB). To get myself out of a pinch, I've mounted a 16GB USB 2.0 flash drive as swap space. Sure, it makes compiling even the most basic software a multi-hour process, but where this machine isn't my daily driver, it's still easier (to me, at least) than cross-compiling.

Openbsd will run fine, even with TLS.

Sure it runs, but will it run TLS 1.3? that seems to be a big requirement for websites these day

Yes, no issues.

Do you happen to know if the Chromium port is packaged for this platform? Have you used it?

It's packaged, and I tried it. But you should boost up /etc/login.conf values on resources.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com