How to determine which OS's would work best with legacy hardware?

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Forgive the novice question but I'm a newb to the site as well as pretty new to tinkering with PC's. I have an old HP Pavillion 6635 (I believe it's 66 MHz) with very little RAM that I plan to update if I can figure this out first.

My question is, is it possible to use a live CD with a lightweight Linux distro to install a newer operating system on the legacy HP? The main goal is to use it as a playground web server to learn HTML, PHP, MySQL and other web technologies.

I've used live CD's to reimage my old laptop but it wasn't nearly as old as the HP desktop. I tried a similar approach but it just hangs in the initial blue HP screen during boot. If I rearrange the boot order to boot from the hard disk first, it will boot to Windows 98 SE, but with old UN's and passwords. I know there's a tool with Kali Linux to change the Admin password but again, that would require a live CD.

Again, thanks in advance for your help and patience. Still learning site etiquette so please feel free to correct mistakes as you see fit.

Bests, CS

crustySocks

Posted 2016-03-14T20:21:59.180

Reputation: 13

1Even Arch Linux requires 128 MB RAM but this computer only has 64 MB. I think you would waste your time with this 18 years old computer. Any used netbook or a Raspberry Pi would serve better for your purpose and they are pretty accessible economically. – Teo – 2016-03-14T20:33:07.580

@dx486 thanks for the response. That should have been part of my question, whether it was even worth the time. I'm just getting into tinkering with computers and I have a few OLD PC's lying around and was just trying to think of some cool way to repurpose them rather than junking them. Thanks for the tip! – crustySocks – 2016-03-14T20:55:37.277

When booting Win98SE, you can hold F8 or Ctrl, and may be able to get to a command line (before the GUI finishes starting, well before the GUI asks for a password). (Maybe see also: Shift-F8, F5, Shift-F5.) You may have more options by using older operating systems (including older releases of current operating systems); your biggest issue of concern will probably be RAM, so check memory requirements of various operating systems. Some computers of that day did not boot CDs quite as easily... (for a 66Mhz machine, it may have a floppy disk.) – TOOGAM – 2016-03-14T21:10:54.197

Note that even if the thing boots, this thing probably won't be able to use modern mySQL and might not be able to use any mySQL due to memory shortage. I'm not sure about PHP. HTML oughtta work if you're so ambitious. (Of course, may need to use an old version of the web server.) – TOOGAM – 2016-03-14T21:12:06.130

@TOOGAM thanks for the reply! I have a few Raspberry Pi's at home and I knew they would be able to do what I essentially want to do. It sounds like this would be more of a headache than a fun side project. Thanks for the advice all! I guess I'll have to find some other way to get some use out of the old machines!! – crustySocks – 2016-03-14T21:21:35.120

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damn_Small_Linux – Moab – 2016-03-14T21:24:54.667

@Moab thanks! That's pretty impressive stuff! – crustySocks – 2016-03-14T21:35:55.573

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There are some other featherweight Linux distros that will run in that amount of RAM or less. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions_that_run_from_RAM. That said, what you can run on top may be limited and could require some work.

– fixer1234 – 2016-03-15T16:08:54.880

Answers

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A HP pavillion is on old computer, it specs were Celeron 533 MHz, 64 MiB memory and 10.2 GiB disk.

The CPU is fast enough to work with for your goals and the disk space might be laugable by todays standards (a pendrive tend to have more), but it is enough to install and OS and a LAMP stack. Maybe not enough to run serios production sites, but certainly enough to play with.

The memory on the other hand is rather limiting, and finding compatible memory to expand it would be hard. Thus let us focus on what runs on 64 MiB and leaves enough space to power your LAMP stack.

The old OS, w98 will work, but finding a modern LAMP stack which works with that is a big challenge. A more modern windows (say ancient XP SP0) would work fine with 64MiB, but that also leaves few spare resources for any application and it would be quite vulnerable. Not a problem if you do not connect it to the Internet and an option if you want to stick to windows and just setup your own little LAN.

A more modern windows will simply not run or will leave you to resources starved. That leaves other operating systems sunch as BSDs and Linuxes as candidates. These have similar issues. Slackware 3 ran just fine on 32MiB, but a more modern slackware requires more resources. And slack is one of the barest generic Linux distributions.

If you move to a non generic instll, e.g. the Damn snmall linux installation mentioned in comments then you may be able to get a working system, but be prepared to start paging to a slow swap partion.

Which leave us with three options:

  1. Be very patient with the system. It can work. But it will be slow.
  2. Find more memory. Which is like finding parts for a Fort-T.
  3. Or do not use the hardware. The raspberry pies mentioned ship with much more memory, are very cheap and use significantly less power. This seems the way to do, albeith not an answer to the question as stated.

Hennes

Posted 2016-03-14T20:21:59.180

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Asked: 2016-03-14T20:21:59.180

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Active: 2016-12-02T23:19:29.673