Pentium I 233MHz, RAM 128MB, 10G HDD

arkar

arkar

I have this old computer and i wanna use it to learn freeBSD. But the thing is I am not so sure of latest version FreeBSD can be installed on that machine or not.

Pls advice..

Thanks,
arkar
 
I have the latest version of FreeBSD on a Pentium 1 200MHz with 64MB of RAM and a 2G hard disk. It's possible, but it depends on what you want to use it for.
 
Hello,

It is possible to install FreeBSD on a Pentium 1. Keep in mind that the FreeBSD project tries to support this hardware as well, but as we've seen in the past, there is always a chance support will get phased out.

A couple of years ago we phased out 386 processor support. I think the reason for its removal was that it wasn't possible to supply a both I386_CPU and SMP kernel, effectively making it harder to ship release media for 386 processors.

Be sure to toy around with FreeBSD on the Pentium 1, it's fun. The only thing I'm saying is that I wouldn't use it to control my space shuttle. ;)
 
arkar said:
I have this old computer and i wanna use it to learn freeBSD.
Click to expand...

Good idea to use virtual machine such as VmWare (proprietary), VirtualBox (OpenSource, GPLv2) and other... for educational activities.
 
arkar said:
Pls advice..
Click to expand...

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE
CPU: Pentium/P54C (150.34-MHz 586-class CPU)
Origin = "GenuineIntel" Id = 0x52c Stepping = 12
Features=0x1bf<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8>
real memory = 268419072 (255 MB)
avail memory = 253145088 (241 MB)
Intel Pentium detected, installing workaround for F00F bug
ed0: <RealTek 8029> port 0xd800-0xd81f irq 11 at device 12.0 on pci0
ad0: 19130MB <SAMSUNG SV2001H QN100-09> at ata0-master UDMA33

...and all this hardware is a 10Mbps router (also firewall) for home network & DNS server.
 
You can do a minimal install and watch your HD space afterwards. The rest you should have 0 problem with ;)
 
I disagree. Part of learning FreeBSD is learning how to install and upgrade your ports. With only 10GB of HD, you will run out of space fast when using portupgrade. At the very least arkar needs more space to play.

I agree with dima's suggestion for virtualization, but it just isn't the same as learning on a real box. The last time I did a make buildkernel virtually (with VPC 2007) it took hours. On my home box the first buildkernel takes less time even though its specs were "less" than the virtual machine. Go figure.
 
One of the boxes I am running FreeBSD on is an old Ultra 60 - dual 333 mhz....it's located about 90 miles away from me atm, and unfortunately my dumb butt locked myself out when playing with ipfw some time ago :-/
 
estrabd said:
One of the boxes I am running FreeBSD on is an old Ultra 60 - dual 333 mhz....it's located about 90 miles away from me atm, and unfortunately my dumb butt locked myself out when playing with ipfw some time ago :-/
Click to expand...

That is sparc64. So what you have is comparable to about
1.2Ghz= 4x333Mhz DeLL PIII servers with two older Xeon chips. That is actually very powerful machine comparing to what he has. You
probably have 3Dcreator video card quite a bit of RAM and SCSI hard drives which are real hardware.
Comparing that to Wintel commodity hardware is sad (for Wintel of course). In your case I would run OpenBSD on that Ultra 60 which has
the best support including MP after Solaris. Solaris 10 is also free now. Open Solaris has no sparc64 version. I would not run FreeBSD on anything else except i386 and AMD64 (server only).


I would strongly recommend him to run NetBSD. He also needs to run XFree86 which is still default on NetBSD.Ports are out of question.
He has to use binary packages. For the good list of applications
which would run well on such machine see the Damn Small Linux web-site.
 
CPU and ram is so weak, how to recompile the kernel and the userland?

Maybe you can install the ports tree, but how to compile some one, compilation time will too long and disk space also too small.

For a newcomer, the x-windows system is essential, and x-windows need cpu and ram resource.
 
fender0107401 said:
CPU and ram is so weak, how to recompile the kernel and the userland?
Click to expand...
Exactly the same way as on a powerful machine. It only takes a lot longer. I can remember my first fbsd installs. Building world took pretty much most of the day. I currently can get it done in just under 2 hours.

Maybe you can install the ports tree, but how to compile some one, compilation time will too long and disk space also too small.
Click to expand...
Disk space would indeed be a problem. Time probably isn't.
 
SirDice said:
Exactly the same way as on a powerful machine. It only takes a lot longer. I can remember my first fbsd installs. Building world took pretty much most of the day. I currently can get it done in just under 2 hours.


Disk space would indeed be a problem. Time probably isn't.
Click to expand...

All the more reason not to do this in a virtual environment on your primary computer. Taking all day to compile is not terrible when you can walk away and do other things.
 
SeanC said:
I disagree. Part of learning FreeBSD is learning how to install and upgrade your ports. With only 10GB of HD, you will run out of space fast when using portupgrade. At the very least arkar needs more space to play.

I agree with dima's suggestion for virtualization, but it just isn't the same as learning on a real box. The last time I did a make buildkernel virtually (with VPC 2007) it took hours. On my home box the first buildkernel takes less time even though its specs were "less" than the virtual machine. Go figure.
Click to expand...

My fw for years was an old PII 333/256MB/6.4GB box, running FreeBSD from 6.0 to 6.3 and finally 7.0 and its stable.

space was no problem, when compiling base+kernel and some ports. it got to be also webmail, run cacti+mysql+snmp, pf+altq, squid, and some things I can remember :)

just had issues with disk space for storing stuff ;)

none
 
ed@ said:
Hello,

The only thing I'm saying is that I wouldn't use it to control my space shuttle. ;)
Click to expand...

Quote from er. Wikipedia:

"In 1990, the original computers were replaced with an upgraded model AP-101S, which has about 2.5 times the memory capacity (about 1 megabyte) and three times the processor speed (about 1.2 million instructions per second). The memory was changed from magnetic core to semiconductor with battery backup."

So a Pentium I 233 with 128Mb ram would be a BIG upgrade. I read somewhere they also had 486 Thinkpads, running Solaris.
 
I used to have my network gateway on a Pentium 133 with 32MB of RAM. I was runnning FreeBSD 6.2 with PF and Samba for sharing a 40GB Hard Drive without any performances issues. I have juste upgraded in order to make Apache, PHP and MySQL works faster.
 
Well I have a 266 Mhz Celeron and use it for hosting Samba, FTP, SSH and MLDonkey services. Don't run X or anything like that and it works great.

And from the above replies there are loads of cool uses for old hardware: firewall, router, file sharing, print server, p2p, etc.

Personally I find using old hardware and getting it to run useful stuff very satisfying.
 
I have FreeBSD6.3 running on a P1 MMX @ 120MHz with 144MB of EDO RAM.
I also don't run X, but many other services:
- ssh
- pf
- mpd (as pppoe server)
- dovecot
- samba
- apache22
- mysql
- proftp
- openvpn (2x)
- MLDonkey

Of course they don't run as fast as on a 'real server', but they have quite a nice performance.
 
FreeBSD on sparc64 is great!

Oko said:
I would not run FreeBSD on anything else except i386 and AMD64 (server only).
Click to expand...

I am using FreeBSD 7.0 with Jails on several old Ultra 10 with 360 MHz processors for web application development, and it works absolutely great. Of course without X, but with Apache, mod_perl or mod_php and even PostgreSQL databases. Pure web server speed is comparable with three times faster P3 processors under Linux, virtual machines with Jails is just fun to setup. The only drawback for me is the lack of Java on FreeBSD/sparc64. If you want to use Java on Sparc, you have to switch to Solaris, which, in turn, on these old machines does not work as fast as FreeBSD and is not as easy to install.

On the other hand I am just writing this post on an 350MHz / 196 MB old Toshiba laptop using XFCE as desktop environment. X itself is not the big issue, but I would recommend not to use KDE or Gnome on machines with little RAM - with 128MB I personally would use good old MWM or FVWM.

Using ports or doing a make world with a 10 GB disk would be possible using NFS or an external USB harddisk for example. Not really fast, but useable.
 
foxi said:
I am using FreeBSD 7.0 with Jails on several old Ultra 10 with 360 MHz processors for web application development, and it works absolutely great. Of course without X, but with Apache, mod_perl or mod_php and even PostgreSQL databases. Pure web server speed is comparable with three times faster P3 processors under Linux, virtual machines with Jails is just fun to setup. The only drawback for me is the lack of Java on FreeBSD/sparc64.
Click to expand...
FreeBSD doesn't run on serious SUN hardware and it is not big deal anyway! SUN hardware comes bundled with very decent OS. FreeBSD doesn't even run on 4 year old Blades 1000 let alone on something newer. You are running machine which has only museum value. By the way those Ultra 10 are the worse machines in the Ultra series. I prefer Tauting 10 Ultra clones for that matter.
Do not get me wrong I have my own museum value computers. I run OpenBSD on SGI O2 and on one SUN Ultra Enterprise 2 which has two processor and on which OpenBSD runs with SMP kernel:-)
I tried recently even to install NetBSD on my old Atari but
I realized that the first supported model was TT and I have ST.

Does it mean that OpenBSD supports SGI hardware. Not really.
If you do happen to have serious SGI hardware you run Irix.
OpenBSD however does have very, very serious support for sparc64
which is only second to Solaris.

Speaking of Ultra 10 speed. It is actually equivalent to PIII so I do not know why you are surprised. RISK stands for Reduced
Instruction Set so actual speed of Ultra in units equivalent to
Intel speed is 4x360Mh=1.44Gh.

Of course that FreeBSD is faster on Ultra 10 than Solaris.
Solaris comes with many services turned on. It also comes with
X and not just any X. It used to come with Open Win which is old version of X window system.
It also supports accelerated X server unlike FreeBSD.;)
 
Oko said:
FreeBSD doesn't run on serious SUN hardware and it is not big deal anyway! SUN hardware comes bundled with very decent OS. FreeBSD doesn't even run on 4 year old Blades 1000 let alone on something newer.
Click to expand...

I've run FreeBSD/sparc64 on old and new sun hardware, with no problems. Where are you getting your info? Granted, I haven't tried on a blade 1000, but despite the old addage, one bad apple doesn't spoil the bunch.

Oko said:
Speaking of Ultra 10 speed. It is actually equivalent to PIII so I do not know why you are surprised. RISK stands for Reduced
Instruction Set so actual speed of Ultra in units equivalent to
Intel speed is 4x360Mh=1.44Gh.
Click to expand...

Not to be nitpicky, but it's RISC, and stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer (or Computing)... Which would explain the C rather than the K...

Oko said:
Of course that FreeBSD is faster on Ultra 10 than Solaris.
Solaris comes with many services turned on. It also comes with
X and not just any X. It used to come with Open Win which is old version of X window system.
It also supports accelerated X server unlike FreeBSD.;)
Click to expand...

Solaris isn't slow because it comes with many services turned on. In fact, the last time I installed Solaris, I specifically remember it asking me if I want to enable any services. I selected no, as I can enable them manually myself after installation. Also, I don't recall the default install on Solaris/sparc64 installing X, that was an add-on option. Come to think of it, I don't think it was enabled by default on the i386 branch either... I think I had to select it if needed (I'm speaking strictly of Solaris, and not OpenSolaris or any derivative thereof).

Long story short, while FreeBSD/sparc64 is a tier 2 arch, I found that it works fine.

Back on subject, as I mentioned earlier, the OP will have no problem with this hardware. Even disc space shouldn't be a problem, as on my old system I have a 2.1GB hard drive, with the ports/src trees installed. Sure, there's not much free space, but I'm not storing many files on it anyways.
 
cajunman4life said:
I've run FreeBSD/sparc64 on old and new sun hardware, with no problems. Where are you getting your info? Granted, I haven't tried on a blade 1000, but despite the old addage, one bad apple doesn't spoil the bunch.
Click to expand...
From FreeBSD web-site of course
http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/sparc.html

I misspelled RISC obviously:-)

Even NetBSD doesn't support SUN hardware in real sense.
http://www.netbsd.org/ports/sparc64/

The only Open Source Project with serious support for SUN hardware is OpenBSD

http://www.openbsd.org/sparc64.html

In particular pay attention to SMP support by OpenBSD and its support for UltraSPARC IV, UltraSPARC T1, UltraSPARC T2, SPARC64-V, SPARC64-VI and SPARC64-VII processors which are essentially newest SUN machines;)

If we speak of portability OpenBSD has also by far the best support for MacPPC architecture but it is irrelevant as it is dead as of 2006.

NetBSD famous portability is very questionable when it comes to real hardware. I mean something produced in the last 10 years.

It looks on the another hand that FreeBSD might really support finally something other than i386 and amd64. The lots of money has been fueled into ARM and embedded MIPS which will soon become tier one;)
 
I'm running FreeBSD 7.0 on a Plll 667 with 256 MB RAM, 10 GB HD. My disk space is manageable if I install packages and stay away from the ports collection. I think X would run on your unit if you used a minimilast wm, maybe Flux?
 
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