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Utility Linux Distribution

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legodude

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Oct 3, 2023
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Can anyone recommend a good modern(ish) linux distribution for Pentium II class machines?

By utility I mean wide hardware support and being able to image ancient scsi disks, mount a variety of filesystems, check out various PCI and ISA cards, etc.

By modern I mean features like python more recent than 1.x, etc.

My pentium III 450mhz/256mb ram is my fastest system that still has a full compliment of legacy ports and I find these type of activities much easier in linux than in WIndows 2000 or XP. I tried a version of Puppy Linux based on Xenial and encountered a panic on boot because it does not understand my Adaptec 2940...

thanks
mike
 
Maybe your boot panic is simply due to missing the aic7xxx module? When built as a module, you'll need an initrd with the module in it to boot straight to a hard disk. What disk were you booting puppy with?
 
Try an old Debian distro, say, Etch, Jessie or Stretch. Buster is still LTS, but might be too much for your system. I can verify that Etch runs on a VIA C9 system just fine.
The 2940 SCSI controller has been supported for a very long time; not sure what your problem is.

Do look for a very old version of Puppy, if you want to run that, but Pup is Debian-based in any case: https://forum.puppylinux.com/puppy-linux-collection Slacko is a good starting point.
 
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Asking "which distro" is a bit incorrect, you should instead be asking "which desktop environment" and "what arch is the 32 bit version compiled against".

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, distros had a mostly clear separation of CPU features they expected. i386 for 386, i486 for 486, i586 for Pentium, i686 for Pentium Pro and Pentium II. All of that pretty much went away in the early 2010s. "32 bit" and "i386" these days usually means some sort of Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 that supports at least SSE2, sometimes SSE3. Web browsers were the first to ditch support for old SSE only CPUs, which axes the Pentium 3 and Athlon XP and lower. Application packages have also moved that direction, with many requiring SSE2 or above, even though they'll say they're "32 bit".

If you want a more modern Linux distro that still mostly supports the Pentium II, you'll need to find an older distro that predates 2010ish. Or you'll have to compile every single package yourself for your machine, which can quite literally take days.

Desktop environments are another problem. With such a slow CPU, you'll want to stick with older Desktop Environments like KDE 3.5, Gnome 2.x, XFCE, LXDE or the default TWM.
 
For best resuts, i'd suggest to pick an ancient verson within about 5 years of the computers age.
Even the 32bit versions are now gone or disappearing fast.
 
Linux Distros up until around 2010 had good support for older hardware. It wasn't until after that that Linux started getting increasingly bloated and more demanding of hardware it ran on.
 
FWIW, XFCE is the default for Debian nowadays; it's pretty much been my desktop since the Gnome project started screwing up. It's relatively lightweight and intuitive.
I should add that Debian is the kernel base for a vast number of distros--and is pretty conservative, or, at least it used to be.
 
I tried TinyCore and it has the same problems as the Puppy Linux I tried - no SCSI support. I tried Debian Etch and it found everything correctly, but then I wasn't paying close enough attention and it decided to wipe the MBR of the IDE drive rather than the SCSI drive I was installing to so I lost interest with that. I've been using linux for ~25yrs now, but this flashback to early 2000s is reminding me how rough it was.

In positive news, I remembered that Knoppix was a thing. I somewhat randomly selected 5.1.1 and it booted right up to some sort of X windows (all I need is to be able to use multiple terminal windows) and has SCSI, SMP, network, and NTFS support so it is looking very promising so far. I'll give it a go for a while then report back

mike
 
legodude said:
Can anyone recommend a good modern(ish) linux distribution for Pentium II class machines?

By utility I mean wide hardware support and being able to image ancient scsi disks, mount a variety of filesystems, check out various PCI and ISA cards, etc.

By modern I mean features like python more recent than 1.x, etc.
Click to expand...

Not Linux, but I will vouch for FreeBSD 5, I've ran it on Pentium MMX back as secondary comp in P4 days.
It will do what you want out of the box, from CLI. If you want more, thousands of packages are still available.

http://ftp-archive.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD-Archive/old-releases/i386/5.5-RELEASE/packages/python/ <- 2.4 with packages

FreeBSD is complete OS, and has centralized documentation and probably the best documentation of any OS available. I think this is important if you want to work with obsolete Unix.
Example; couple of releases ago system moved from static pkg tools (which are somewhat equivalent of rpm command) to pkg via repos.
If I want documentation on ancient pkg-add, because the current is just an alias for new 'pkg', I just select the version here on site;

pkg_add(1)

man.freebsd.org man.freebsd.org

And there in the "environment" section you can see how to point that command to use the archive freebsd FTP so you can just pkg_add any package from the internet with automatic dependency resolution.
I'm not aware of the 20 year old Linux distribution that can still work with remote packages.

Also, people on the FreeBSD forum will help you with running this. I think there are still 4.4 systems in the wild.
 
Also see this thread here :

forums.freebsd.org

Is it works on this hardware?

Hi guys. I have a old pc with pentium II mmx 300mhz 128mb ram. Can i install freeBSD 13.1 stabile on it?
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org

You can try any version of FreeBSD whatsoever, but the recommendation has been given for NetBSD. Indeed it can be made with a smaller footprint.
In any case BSDs you can install as a whole OS, and try out the remote packages, usual modern stuff. If packages don't work, you have a ports system that can compile any package on the computer against proper architecture with one command given. If kernel idle memory usage is high, you can configure and compile your own on the spot.

My recommendation is to not run X11, disk imaging is via CLI anyway, device listing, python scripts. If you need to, because of a tool, install basic X11 with SVGA and just run the tool without any desktop environment.
 
I've used NetBSD (old versions, maybe 4.x) on old hardware in CLI mode to support some crufty old peripherals. Just to be clear that NetBSD in not Linux; it's actually UNIX.
 
Yeah I put thumbs up for NetBSD too.

Interestingly enough there is a whole discussion to be had about UNIX vs Unix vs Unix-like and so on...

For all intents they are, as descendants of BSD UNIX. And followers of the spirit and philosophy right to this day. But not for all purposes; since the explicit SysV code removal in 1993, and never taking Open Group certification afterwards, no straight BSD system has had certification and couldn't compete against likes of AIX when it comes to getting the installation contracts.
 
I would recommend taking a look at one of the old versions of SUSE Linux from that time period - for example, version 7.3 with the 2.4 kernel.

They released a really slick boxed set that contained a manual, a nice installer (yast) and all the available software on CD, so you don't need a working network service for the install. SUSE was a major early player and produced, imho, one of the best distros of that era. The old boxed sets are available cheap on ebay.
 
^ https://archive.org/details/SuSELinux_DVD

This one might be better, CDs : https://archive.org/details/suse-linux-73-personal-german

But the question was "modernish", I don't believe anyone is maintaining a Linux 2.4 general desktop system, might be possible to find utilitarian live ISO still running on 2.4.
NetBSD and FreeBSD still have Adaptec 2940 support in the "master" branch :

ahc(4) - NetBSD Manual Pages

man.netbsd.org man.netbsd.org

ahc(4)

man.freebsd.org man.freebsd.org

By the way, FreeBSD from 20 years ago has official nVidia drivers, and if you run them, you'll get a cool nVidia logo when you boot up X :)
 
Talking about UNIX, Slackware is probably the most UNIX-like Linux distro we're ever going to see. It's a full system worth of 15+ GB of software (of which one would use probably 3-4 realistically) and fits on a single DVD-R. There are projects such slackpkg and sbopkg which make installing and compiling software really quite easy if you've got the time (and nerves!) to install all the dependencies manually. No dependency resolution is Slack's biggest drawback IMO: it worked in the 90's and early 2000's, but as software gets fatter and more cumbersome to manage manually, so does Slackware. However, once you get used to it, you get used to it good and can with some time make a really clean and lean (TM) system.

If you're not willing to go the lenght, and I fully get that, the installer alone at first can be really daunting with all the crap you'll never use it shoves at you, {Free, Net, Open}BSD are perfect as lightweight systems. FreeBSD has the most hardware support out of the bunch.

P.S. Chances are, if a piece of hardware is supported by the kernel, Slackware will support it out of the box which is nice. (although my practice is to make a custom kernel anyway, this is good only for installation)
 
Pentium 166 MMX with 64 GB of RAM, RIVA TNT2, 10 GB ATA disk, 5.5 running smoothly.
Windowmaker+couple of applications running, no swapping, still plenty of RAM in wired and caches that kernel can release to apps.
 

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Old versions of Debian (2.x) or NetBSD (1.5ish) - are very rough to install and it's easy to screw up. I remember FreeBSD 4.x to be easier to set up. Apple had MacOS X certified as a proper UNIX at some point.

Zare said:
Pentium 166 MMX with 64 GB of RAM
Click to expand...
That is a LOT of RAM you got there. 😁

About a decade ago, I set up a then-recent Debian on a Pentium II with only 64 MB for a student friend. Localegen was thrashing badly for utf8 locales (running it manually from init=/bin/sh made it fit, barely). When I got IceWM + Firefox + Google working without the system needing to swap, I was happy.

If you know your tricks, you can get quite far with older machines, but there are some hard limits approaching fast. For example, the OpenBSD people are somewhat unhappy about Rust, since it cannot be built on a 32-bit system because of address space requirements (OpenBSD is not cross-compiled). The move to rewrite the world in Rust hurts them quite badly, and I think this is just another step shoving 32-bit machines into the embedded-only realm.
 
Svenska said:
Old versions of Debian (2.x) or NetBSD (1.5ish) - are very rough to install and it's easy to screw up. I remember FreeBSD 4.x to be easier to set up. Apple had MacOS X certified as a proper UNIX at some point.
Click to expand...
Well, Linux DOES have been certified as an official UNIX, it just was not done so by an USA corporation.

Huawei did get its Eurler 2.0 Linux system certified as UNIX. Euler 2.0 is a recompile of CentOS 7, which is a recompile of RedHat 7. Therefore, for practical purposes, RedHat 7 is UNIX.

So yes, nowadays Linux is UNIX.
 
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