[TriLUG] lightweight linux distro/pc giveaway

[Jason Tower]

> When the Pentiums first came out, I had a Pentium 60MHz with 1GB hard 
> disk.  It came with 16MB RAM which I upgraded to 32MB.  This would have 
> been circa 1994.
> 
> Windows ran pretty well on it as a desktop OS but I had other things in 
> mind.  I was running a semi-popular BBS in Philadelphia at the time and 
> wanted this primarily to be a BBS box with secondary role as my desktop.
> 
> I installed desqview on it and it ran reasonably well.  Trying to stuff 
> as much into high memory as possible was a challenge but eventually I 
> had a few nodes of my BBS running in desqview sessions and no desktop 
> functionality.  The multitasking in desqview wasn't smooth so while 
> things ran quickly, each DOS session had bursts of activity.  Callers 
> would experience this in the form of a couple of lines of text scrolling 
> at a time with pauses in between.
> 
> So then I bit the bullet and bought OS/2 at the Electronics Boutique at 
> the local mall.
> 
> Paydirt.
> 
> OS/2 ran fantastically on this box.  I ran a few phone lines for the BBS 
> in DOS sessions in the background and had a fantastic GUI desktop 
> running in the foreground.  Dialup internet wasn't hard at all to set 
> up.  The web was more of a curiosity in its infant stages at this point 
> so email and nntp news were more heavily used.  I managed to setup an 
> nntp news feed for my BBS users, which made my BBS that much more 
> popular.  I added a few more phone lines and the performance wasn't so 
> flawless anymore.
> 
> So then I found out you could replace the Presentation Manager in OS/2 
> with various other front end interfaces.  I picked one called "tshell" 
> which was functionally a lot more like desqview.  It basically allowed 
> me to set up a number of command line virtual consoles and run each node 
> of the BBS in one (I was still running on Renegade software, which ran 
> on a DOS emulation layer in OS/2).  So I lost my desktop but the BBS 
> handled 8 phone lines plus my sysop console in a way that my users raved 
> about.  They thought I had a dedicated pentium box for each phone line 
> and couldn't believe it when I told them I indeed had all 8 lines 
> running on one box.  There was also a trick some sysops used to do 
> involving setting up a second computer as a games server with a serial 
> connection to the bbs machine but I didn't have to do that.  It all ran 
> on one box.
> 
> After I took down the BBS, that machine made for a fantastic OS/2 
> desktop for several years before it got zapped in a storm.
> 
> I've had a number of other first generation Pentiums (and still do).  
> Especially Pentium 100 and 133MHz machines with 16 or 32MB of memory.  
> They are very useful as an indicator of just how porky Linux is 
> getting.  Using Red Hat as a test distro, I think the point of no return 
> was in the transition from Red Hat Linux 6.2 to 7.0 (well before Fedora 
> Core).  That's just going from memory.  I'm pretty sure that's when RHL 
> became fairly useless on old hardware.  As an interesting point of 
> comparison, Windows 98 also runs pretty well on this hardware.
> 
> Even the most current version of OpenBSD runs great on these old 
> machines.  It doesn't just limp along.  It is actually very usable and 
> if you're a command line guy you might find you don't mind the old 
> hardware much at all.
> 
> Remember, in 1994 a Pentium 90MHz was considered a top end workstation.  
> These machines have not gotten any slower as they get older.  What has 
> changed?  First and foremost, software has gotten porkier and porkier.  
> Secondly, our expectations have changed.
> 
> Participation in the OLPC project will be good for Red Hat directly, and 
> the Open Source community as a whole indirectly.  Porting Linux to this 
> hardware is going to highlight so many of the inefficiencies that have 
> crept into Linux over the years.
> 
> Interestingly I tried installing RHEL5 on a test machine to try it out.  
> It had 256MB of memory.  Insane by 1994 standards.  OS/2 wouldn't know 
> what to do with all that.  My biggest servers probably had that much in 
> 1994.  Today, RHEL5 installer calls that "low memory" and forces a text 
> mode installation, and various other "low memory" compromises.  Does 
> anyone else see something wrong with this picture?
> 
> Note, I'm not trying to single out Red Hat.  I use it on all of my 
> production servers at work.  So I have my hands on it more often than 
> other distributions.  I've seen similar problems with other major 
> distributions.

an interesting post.  i was thinking about this topic recently while waiting 
for one of my openbsd sparc stations to generate ssh keys (a process which 
takes a second or two on recent hardware but over 20 minutes on the sparc). 
  consider the following:

bloated desktops w/ lots of toys and eye candy.  this is the most commonly 
blamed culprit for distro bloat and performance problems, and with good 
reason.  but even if you run twm there are plenty of other things that 
conspire to slow things down when using older hardware in today's world.

lots more stuff is written in a high level interpreted languages (perl, 
python, etc) rather than compiled C/C++.  there are lots of reasons and 
benefits of this but speed is not one of them.

encryption is more prevalent, and that's a MAJOR consumer of cpu time.  back 
in the day when i needed to transfer files from one system to another i'd 
typically set up nfs if it were more than a couple hundred megs.  nowadays i 
virtually always use scp or rsync over ssh.  my modern laptop can scp at 
100mb/s without breaking a sweat, even a p2 that was state of the art less 
than a decade ago will be pegged at 10 or 20% of that speed.

more background stuff and layers of abstraction happening.  daemons that 
continuously monitor file changes, lvm, software raid, power monitoring 
daemons, ssh-agent, dbus and hald, journaled filesystems, smartd, multiple 
logging daemons, and so on.  try running 'ps -ef' and you may be surprised 
at how many processes are running in the background.  individually none of 
these add significant load, but add them all up and it starts to matter, 
especially when you don't have oodles of spare cpu cycles as with older hw. 
  and perhaps more importantly they chew up ram which can lead to increased 
swapping which exacerbates performance problems since older machines tend to 
have less ram as well as weaker procs.

chattier protocols.  with more bandwidth generally available, there less 
reason to try squeezing every ounce of data from a network stream.  all that 
network traffic has to flow thru the cpu eventually.  and wireless?  that's 
a whole nother layer that requires cpu intervention, especially if 
encryption is used.

the www is different.  it used to be that limited bandwidth was almost 
always the limiting factor when surfing the web.  these days on anything but 
the fastest hardware the cpu is just as likely as be the bottleneck thanks 
to larger pages, tons of content, far more flash, and extensive use of 
client-side scripting that simply wasn't used five or ten years ago.  and 
don't get me started on HTML email.  even if you turn off rendering entirely 
as i do, each message is still five times larger than plain text and that 
has more overhead that will be noticed on slower CPUs.

even given all these points, it is still entirely possible to have a nicely 
running linux system on a low end pentium w/ 32mb or so of ram, even with a 
modern distro.  yes, the distros have gotten more bloated, and they're 
definitely not as stripped down as they used to be by default, but you can't 
blame the OS entirely.  even if i were to simulate a time warp by installing 
RHL 6.2 on a pentium 166 it would "feel" a lot slower in a current 
environment than it would have in 1997.

jason