On Jun 1, 2015, at 5:56 PM, Jose Martinez <jomartinez...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey guys, > I'm about to be blessed with several old PC computers. By old I mean that > some of them will not even have CDROM drives on them. I will probably tear > them all down, mix-and-match parts and make the best system(s) I can from > those parts. This is something I've done before, so the technical aspects > are not a problem. I expect to use the resulting system(s) solely for "play" > purposes to experiment with and delve into the depths of the system > programming primarily for educational purposes. If any of you remember > Scotty from the original Star Trek series and how he spent his off/vacation > time pouring over tech manuals and playing with gadgets, well that's me! > > The question is, will jessie install and run on these old systems? If not, > can I still get a debian distro that will? I expect that the processors on > at least one of them will be at least i386 or better, so I also expect that > jessie will install and run, but that my main problem will be with drivers > for the legacy peripherals. > > I just can't find it within me to throw out what is, other than being old, a > good usable computer system. > > I appreciate any information y'all can send my way. Welcome to the club, Jose! I do the same sort of thing for old Macintosh PowerPC machines. It’s actually kind of fun… (for certain definitions of “fun” <-: ) You may find a distro targeted at so called “embedded” computers that will run on your hardware. Do a Google search for “debian linux embedded x86”. That seems to have some useful pointers. Top of the list is “emdebian”. The Emdebian page says: > Embedded_Debian > > Change of status > As of July 2014, Emdebian Grip stopped receiving updates to the unstable-grip > distribution. Updates to the jessie-grip suite stopped some months before > that. The last stable release of Emdebian Grip was 3.1 based on Debian > GNU/Linux 7.1 Wheezy. > There will be no further updates of Emdebian Grip. > This information is retained for historical purposes but can be removed when > wheezy is finally removed from the Debian mirrors (which will happen at some > point before the next stable release after Debian Jessie 8.0). So you can at least get a version of Wheezy that might work on your hardware. Jessie looks to be not in the cards. I guess porting Systemd to minimal hardware was just too hard… )-: A little further down the list is Voyage Linux, which is a Debian derivative. I’ve used Voyage. Some of the things they do to make it fit in a very small footprint are quite creative! I learned a lot when I was doing that work. Good luck, and have lots of fun! Rick -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/a0dfe854-b601-438e-b297-beea11a9e...@pobox.com
