Re: [PLUG] 32-Bit Linux

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 1:34 PM Casey Bralla via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> On 11/9/20 11:49 AM, jeffv via plug wrote:
> > 11 Linux Distributions You Can Rely on for Your Ancient 32-bit Computer
> > https://itsfoss.com/32-bit-linux-distributions/
>
> One of the listed distributions is Gentoo.  I've finally gotten Gentoo
> loaded on a Pentium III w/ 512 MBytes RAM.  It was a very difficult
> ordeal.  Theoretically, you can build a 32-bit system with Gentoo, but
> almost any recent desktop environment or browser will require 64-bit
> libraries and/or a processor capable of sse2 instructions to build on
> Gentoo.
>
> It's bad enough that __I'm__ a dinosaur, but now one of my favorite old
> laptops is too! :)

Having used Gentoo since dinosaurs were walking around I have mixed
opinions on that.  It really depends.

If you're going to run super-lightweight EVERYTHING a P3 is probably
fine.  SSE2 is almost certainly not required for most of the OS.

However, when you get into the more desktop-y stuff like Gnome/Plasma,
and almost any modern browser, you're probably going to start running
into issues.  Instruction sets might be an issue though I would think
that most would still build without specific instruction sets (they
should if they're multi-arch - not like SSE2 works on ARM with the
same exact instructions).  The big issue is going to be just building
them at all, and also memory requirements.  Modern browsers can take a
LOT of CPU-time to build, and a lot of RAM while building.  I was
struggling to build chromium on 16GB of RAM before I just switched to
pre-compiled.  You're not going to find pre-compiled anything that
runs on a Pentium III though.  Building a modern browser on such an
old CPU is going to take ages - they take longer to build than
kernels, and the kernel takes forever to build on a Pi, and a Pi is
going to be much faster than a P3.

Forget libreoffice or anything like that as well.  You really need to
be using simple stuff with a system like that.

Also, keep in mind energy-efficiency.  Those old CPUs used quite a bit
of power to do almost nothing.  A $35 Pi is going to vastly outperform
it and they consume maybe 15W top when they're going all-out, and
milliwatts when idle.  They probably will have more RAM as well.  It
actually doesn't take that much time for an old PC to burn through $35
worth of electricity if it is running a lot.  Plus the Pi is going to
have HDMI out and not some VGA connector that you'll struggle to deal
with.  If you're going to hook it up to an ancient CRT monitor I
guarantee that thing will burn through the price-difference in
electricity pretty quickly.  Heck, the Pi might be more
energy-efficient running qemu to emulate x86.  :)

I think the best option really depends on what you want to do with it.
With Gentoo getting a really old i386+ system booted to console
shouldn't be too big of a problem.  You might want to either
cross-compile the kernel or take an axe to the config options to strip
it down.  Plus you might need to enable AGP or whatever ancient
wizardry it uses for display.

-- 
Rich
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