How An Old Pentium 4 System Runs With Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10

[Chad Page]

Centos 3'd make a lot of sense actually for these kinds of things.

Sadly since all-intel systems tended to work better in the first place, and so many P4/Athlon-era boards have died of bad caps... I don't know how much work's being done with older non-all-intel systems. Feels like the instutional knowledge so to speak's faded away.

[squirrl]

Are there any 2.4/old-XFree distros out there that are even vaguely security-patched? RH 6.2 was pretty bad when it was new, IIRC.

Maybe it's time for a hybrid old/new distribution, but that's quite a bit of effort really.

Maintenance isn't too bad on old systems. Bind, SSH and the kernel are what I normally would worry about.

For example, Slackware 9.1 came with XFree86 4.3.0. As far as maintenance, it's mostly updating the Bind and SSH if you use those.
2.6.38.3 seems to be the most recent stable 2.4 kernel.

Four hours of work will net you a cohesive legacy computing experience. Legacy is a good thing. Be amazed at the speed old Linux nets on old hardware.

[squirrl]

make that 2.4.37.11

Maintenance isn't too bad on old systems. Bind, SSH and the kernel are what I normally would worry about.

For example, Slackware 9.1 came with XFree86 4.3.0. As far as maintenance, it's mostly updating the Bind and SSH if you use those.
2.6.38.3 seems to be the most recent stable 2.4 kernel.

Four hours of work will net you a cohesive legacy computing experience. Legacy is a good thing. Be amazed at the speed old Linux nets on old hardware.

[Ashc]

This P4 is almost the same as my desktop

My specs are :
Pentium 4 HT 3.0 Prescott
1024 DDR1 400
Intel 865 (Intel desktop board D865PERL)
Ati 9250
Arch linux
Latest KDE / Xorg / Xf86-video-ati / Kernel 2.6.38

And it runs perfectly well

I run the same setup on several older P4's (down to Celeron 1.7 with 512 DDR1) and it works acceptable for basic use

I run it on my notebook (Celeron M 1.4 with 1024 DDR2) and it works fast



The factors i notice in importance order (first = most important) :

Memory size - try to put there at least 768-1024 M

If memory size is limited - hard drive speed (for the swap)

Memory type - system with DDR2 is hell faster than DDR1 even with slower CPU (Celeron M 1.4 vs Pentium 4 HT 3.0 Prescott)

Graphics - anything with working direct rendering (in KDE atleast)

CPU - there is little difference between Pentium / Celeron or different clock speeds, moderate difference with different FSB speeds, and maximum difference with vs without HT