Edit: I am trying to put linux on a compaq armada 1700.
@nichtburningturtle The Pentium II is 32-bit and possesses an MMU, so provided you have adequate memory, pretty much any 32-bit distro such as puppy linux or antix should work fine. Newer Ubuntu which is now 64-bit only will not.
Shit, I’ve thrown out stuff several generations newer than that because it was too old.
NetBSD
Won’t work with much hardware
Works with plenty of hardware, especially something that would run on such a platform.
I have found it to lack support for WiFi and video acceleration
You want wifi and video acceleration on a P2?
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Is nobody gonna ask?!? Why do you have a pentium 2? I like old hardware as much or more than the next guy but man that’s old. And this from a guy who has a working Commodore 64 🤣
throwing Linux on ancient hardware is a time honored tradition
I’ve got a 500mhz Celeron from the P3 days, it runs OS/2 and has an ISA EPROM burner card in it.
I never even thought to ask “why”…
Some time ago I scalvanged some old hardware my old school was gonna throw out.
retro enthusiast community has been growing a lot in recent years, especially with youtube channels like 8-bit guy, LGR, MVG and such
I mean I guess. Just in my opinion a Pentium 2 is too new to be old and too old to be new. Something like 386 or a Coco2, that’s cool.
I deal with a lot of old hardware in my lab but sometimes it’s just too much trouble. But whatever floats your boat. Last thing I’ll be is judgey about what brings you happiness. I mean I’m currently playing with Proxmox on a 2013 Mac Pro because I think it’s fun. And some people (cough …cough… my wife) wonder why 🤣
I run Proxmox on a 2103 trashcan. It is awesome.
Where did you get a trashcan from 2103 you time traveler you… I want one.
With 32MB of RAM you can’t go far. The Linux kernel barely runs on it, and that’s just the kernel. NetBSD also has a minimum requirement of 32GB of RAM. One other thing you can do is try to run BeOS (not Haiku, but BeOS). It could run on 32MB of RAM (it still preferred 64 MB, but it could run on 32 too).
Damn, NetBSD really upped their ram requirements 😂
gentoo. i’m not even gonna look this up but i’d be surprised if immolo hasn’t installed in that platform yet ;)
I installed gentoo on a pentium D it took 5 days to compile and to setup, with distcc.
Why not cross-compile it?
Cause i wanted to see how long it would take
Frankly the power consumption of that thing x performance delivered will be just bad. Take for example this example, a more modern Pentium D vs a Pi:

If you don’t have any kind of attachment to the machine, just trash it, get a Pi or a second hand 8th Gen i5 HP Mini for around 80$ and enjoy. If you do have an attachment to the machine you may as well run some OS from the same era. https://winworldpc.com/library/operating-systems







