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



## arkar (Nov 17, 2008)

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


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## cajunman4life (Nov 17, 2008)

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.


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## ed@ (Nov 17, 2008)

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.


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## mfaridi (Nov 17, 2008)

You can use it for Firewall and router.


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## dima (Nov 17, 2008)

arkar said:
			
		

> I have this old computer and i wanna use it to learn freeBSD.



Good idea to use virtual machine such as VmWare (proprietary), VirtualBox (OpenSource, GPLv2) and other... _for educational activities_.


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## princeps (Nov 17, 2008)

For example: my home gateway is Pentium II 233 MHz, 128Mb RAM, 40Gb HDD with FreeBSD 6.4. Works good.


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## Daemony (Nov 17, 2008)

arkar said:
			
		

> Pls advice..



[font="Courier New"]*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[/font]

...and all this hardware is a 10Mbps router (also firewall) for home network & DNS server.


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## stargazer (Nov 17, 2008)

My old computer with Celeron 300MHz, 64M RAM and 1,7G hard disk also runs FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE


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## Ico (Nov 19, 2008)

You can do a minimal install and watch your HD space afterwards. The rest you should have 0 problem with


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## SeanC (Nov 19, 2008)

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.


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## estrabd (Nov 25, 2008)

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


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## Oko (Nov 25, 2008)

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



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.


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## fender0107401 (Nov 25, 2008)

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.


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## SirDice (Nov 25, 2008)

fender0107401 said:
			
		

> CPU and ram is so weak, how to recompile the kernel and the userland?


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.


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


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## SeanC (Nov 25, 2008)

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.



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.


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## none (Nov 26, 2008)

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.



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


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## michaelrmgreen (Nov 26, 2008)

ed@ said:
			
		

> Hello,
> 
> The only thing I'm saying is that I wouldn't use it to control my space shuttle.



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.


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## mbs (Nov 30, 2008)

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.


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## tangram (Dec 2, 2008)

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.


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## digitalc (Dec 2, 2008)

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.


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## foxi (Dec 25, 2008)

*FreeBSD on sparc64 is great!*



			
				Oko said:
			
		

> I would not run FreeBSD on anything else except i386 and AMD64 (server only).



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.


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## Oko (Dec 26, 2008)

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.


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.


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## cajunman4life (Dec 26, 2008)

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.



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.



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.



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.


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## Oko (Dec 26, 2008)

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.


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


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## hitest (Dec 26, 2008)

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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## Carpetsmoker (Dec 26, 2008)

SeanC said:
			
		

> 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.





			
				hitest said:
			
		

> 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 used a 10GB disk in my workstation until a year ago.

10GB is plenty of space even if you use ports/buildworld,
Of course you can't compile openoffice.org, JDK, KDE, ect. but why would you want to do that anyway?



			
				fender0107401 said:
			
		

> CPU and ram is so weak, how to recompile the kernel and the userland?



With patience.


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## hitest (Dec 26, 2008)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> I used a 10GB disk in my workstation until a year ago.
> 
> 10GB is plenty of space even if you use ports/buildworld,
> Of course you can't compile openoffice.org, JDK, KDE, ect. but why would you want to do that anyway?



I used pkg_add to install KDE and xorg, that worked very well on my older system running FreeBSD 7.0.  I use the ports collection for smaller applications.  I'm looking forward to 7.1, I see it is up to RC2!:e


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## Oko (Dec 26, 2008)

Carpetsmoker said:
			
		

> I used a 10GB disk in my workstation until a year ago.
> 
> 10GB is plenty of space even if you use ports/buildworld,
> Of course you can't compile openoffice.org, JDK, KDE, ect. but why would you want to do that anyway?


Completely agree. I have 6GB HDD on my laptop ThinkPAD E390 and
only 1.5Gb are used by Operating System. I honestly think that anything more than 4.5Gb is still usable for the workstations.
I also believe that anything more than 1Gb is very usable for appliances.
On the another hand I recently start playing with DVD authoring. 
I could tell you that I saw my 160 Gb HDD disappearing in two weeks.


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## Pushrod (Dec 29, 2008)

Old computers like that make good firewalls. I have 7.0 running on a firewall computer with a 1.75G hard drive and it's only 75% full. It has Squid and a bunch of other things as well. The big thing is to keep the ports tree and the obj dir on another machine.


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## luca (Oct 4, 2009)

Hi,

I'm running Freebsd 7.1 on an old Dell P1 233MHz, 128MB RAM and 500GB HD. I use it as home server, NAT / Samba / nfs / mldonkey and torrent.
uptime
## 3:29PM  up 39 days,  3:29, 1 user, load averages: 1.83, 1.69, 1.56

I initially have installed FreeBSD 6.3 which I upgraded to 6.4 :
make buildworld --> 22h
make buildkernel --> 7h

and later migrated to migrated to 7.1.

-luca


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## fronclynne (Oct 5, 2009)

Just as another datum:  I had an old DEC pentium 1 @ something like 100mHz with 64M of RAM and what I guess was a 1.5G HDD (all sadly passed on) that did FreeBSD 6.x okay, except for the flaky IDE controller*.  Put OpenBSD on it and it ran like a champ.


* the warning at probe was something like: "This controller is known to cause data loss" or some sillyness.  It was true, though.


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## rghq (Oct 5, 2009)

P2 233 MHz with 192 MB RAM and a 20 GB HDD - running quite fine. Even X11 with Fvwm would run and for compiling - another more powerful machine and building everything there, copy it then over.


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## Zare (Oct 5, 2009)

I ran 5.4-RELEASE on Olivetti Modula 200 - that's 200MHz Pentium MMX, with 64 MB of EDORAM and 6.4GB Quantum Fireball CX. It ran pretty fine, even X11 with FVWM. 

It served as firewall/router later on, i did recompile a kernel on it (for NAT) and i remember it took a while but not that much.


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## Ruler2112 (Oct 5, 2009)

This is the oldest box I've used FreeBSD on:

I have an old P2-300 server that work was going to throw away running my home gateway server using FreeBSD 7.1.  (It likes it much better than the NT4 that was on it at work...)  I believe it has 256 meg of RAM (all that the mobo can handle) and a 9 gig SCSI drive in it as the primary drive.  I threw in a PCI IDE controller and 2, 250 gig hard drives that are RAIDed and provide a perfect place to store documents and digital pictures via a Samba share.    I've also got apache running so that I can develop CGI scripts at home.

I concur with the above posts - compiling anything takes FOREVER!  It works fine though and I have a killer server tower case which I can lock the door on and is nice & quiet.


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