would linux work on an old pentium III with 512 meg memory?

[kc7jty]

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[ad4mg]

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Yes! There are several flavors of Linux geared towards older machines like this. I am running Ubuntu 9.04 on a very old 750 MHz machine with 512 MB of RAM. Xubuntu is designed for these older machines, and uses the XFCE desktop instead of the more resource hungry Gnome or KDE desktops. There are other distros available, like Puppy Linux, but I haven't toyed with them. Xubuntu is a very capable OS, but don't expect blazing speed from a P-III machine!

[NQ6U]

I agree with Luke--avoid Ubuntu/Kubuntu on your older machine. They use a compositing graphics display engine that really eats up processing power. Xubuntu will work, as will Puppy Linux which I have run on a 500MHz AMD K2 machine with 512MB of RAM.

[n2ize]

basically any Linux will work in text mode on an older/weaker machine. However, you'll need to run a plain vanilla window manager. Nothing fancy like what comes bundled with KDE, etc. Twm might be a good choice for older hardware.

[kc7jty]

tnx, my windows xp on it is so slow with all the security crap running. If I lose the hard drive, or get a killer Trojan I'll switch.

[ad4mg]

tnx, my windows xp on it is so slow with all the security crap running. If I lose the hard drive, or get a killer Trojan I'll switch.

That's the beauty of linux ... you don't need the security stuff. Viruses and malware written for windows just won't run in linux, and there are amazingly few written for linux. Just avoid running as "root" (similar to administrator in Windows), and you're good to go. The Ubuntu distributions don't even activate the root account by default. System commands are run using "sudo", which is "super user", and it requires your password.

There is somewhat of a learning curve involved. Most mainstream linux distributions are probably 95% plug and play, but hardware support isn't quite there yet, mostly due to hardware manufacturers refusing to write linux drivers.

[n6hcm]

absolutely ... you could even get a gui on something like this (although you'd have to choose a slimmer window manager).

[WØTKX]

We run a flavor of Redhat with tweaks on around 80 PC's used as tolling controllers.

60 or so are 486's. :shock:

They control the signaling when traffic runs across the loops... reading RF transponder data from subscribers, axle counts, camera triggering, etc. These peripheral devices send data back to the PC, data is then kept locally for a short bit of time. Depending on the amount of traffic expected at a location, data tables are sucked up via polling from a squad of bigass a (Windows 8) servers. It is a lot of data. Can you say layered flavors of SQL? Sure, I knew you could.

At the (slower toll) ramps they are all 486 "industrial" PC's. No GUI, but a whole page of really weird stuff for our devices rolls by on bootup. Lousy humans need pictures and a mouse. :roll:

Much beefier and faster PC's are used at the (high speed toll) main lanes, but it's still the same command line interface. The custom applications do have HTML pages to manage most of the devices and cameras.

So a typical session working with one means you plug into the network locally with a laptop, then login via putty and HTML. While watching the physical display on the controller PC if you have to do a cold boot.

Pumping all those graphics for a user interface just isn't needed, 90% of commands run on them are to load and unload our "special stuff" when repairs or testing is done... not that many are really Linux OS commands. Don't even bother (or need) to reboot, usually.

The tolling cameras run embedded Linux on flash hardware, BTW.

[n2ize]

I have an older Linux box down in the basement that runs 24/7/365. It runs an older version of Fedora (ver 5 I think) and it provides a number of local and worldwide network services, i.e. router, web server, mailbox, proxy server, DNS, Fax Server, and more. Runs constantly and never crashes. Linux is very stable. Doubt I'd get that kind of mileage on a Windows box. Which reminds me, I need to do some preventative maintenance. I want to shut it down give it a cleaning, backup and replace the drives. maybe even update the OS.