Single core, 32 bit CPU, can’t even do video playback on VLC. But it kinda works for some offline work, like text editing, and even emulation through zsnes! It’s crazy how Linux keeps old hardware like this running.
Thankfully though, this laptop CPU is upgradable, and so is the ram, so I’m planning on revitalizing and bringing this old Itautec to the 21st century 😄
2GB of RAM? Low?
Were you born after the year 2000?
Haha, I’ve been used to 4gb ram minimum for most of my life 😆
I remember when 128MB RAM sticks were $400
I remember expanding my Amiga with 512KB to 1MB Fast RAM and later going crazy with another two megabyte Slow RAM.
I remember my dad’s friend upgrading our PC clone to 640K. He used a soldering iron.
I remember when computers had no memory and the storage was on punch cards made from mammoth leather that we had to tan ourselves after spending our weekends hunting the mammoth with spears. Also we carved our code by hand on stone tablets. Young people these days have it easy.
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You had one job.
Mentioning punch cards had me, but you blew it!
Punch cards. The “true” PC era.
I slept in my first computer - and worked as verbal RAM (first VRAM!) 28 hours a day !
“…and when you tell this to young people today, they won’t believe you !” - Monty Python.
Oh so that’s where the term VRAM comes from! 🤯
“Stone” tablets? Luxury. Ours were dried mammoth dung.
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Lmao, I’ve ran Linux on an eeePC with 1GB RAM and 900MHz Intel Atom. Compiling gcc & glibc could take hours.
Edit: RPi3 still got only 1GB, BeagleBone Black even got 512MB, don’t forget RPi0
Get off my lawn
I still have a cool laptop (with Mandrake and kde) with 192 megs of memory somewhere.
thats my current laptop
Edit: im exagerating but I really have 20-yr 32-bit Dell laptops running minimal debian linux. and my current laptop is 10+ yrs old Lenovo which I already replaced its screen, rams, keyboard, bluetooth, usb ports… and it’s still working flawlessly for daily tasks, video/music editing, coding and programming, internet browsing :D
Are we competing again?
I’m proud to be setting up a rhel10 desktop, as it’ll be the first time I ran Linux as a desktop in 30 years of a Linux/Unix career.
To rephrase: I ran XFree86 on a 4mb i386 machine 30 years ago.
What do I win?
I didnt have the intention to compete, was just proud of seeing this 2007 laptop running a modern OS again!
https://shop.hak5.org/products/shark-jack technically runs openwrt.
SoC: 580MHz MediaTek MT7628 mips CPU Memory: 64 MB DDR2 RAM, 64 MB SPI FlashIt’s not that bad. I run Linux on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, which is much weaker than this. (It’s not a competition, tho. Just saying.) And that’s also a pretty standard device. I’m kinda interested to see if anyone can go below 64M RAM with a modern installation.
I think my lowest was a 33 MHz 486sx (maybe DX) with 8MB of RAM.
I wouldn’t want to try it today though.
The first machine I ran Linux on was a 486DX 33MHz too. I think it had 8 MB (or some weird thing like 4 MB originally and randomly stuck 8 MB addition? I don’t remember anymore.)
I had the exact same configuration. 4MB RAM upgraded to 8MB. 40MB HDD upgraded to 200MB later. And the fugliest case with triangular pastel buttons you ever saw. Ran Windows 3.11 then Slackware Linux on that for many years.
Who used those triangular pastel buttons? I remember seeing them on some friends’ computers but not on any Dells or Gateway 2000 machines. Maybe Compaq? Or Packard Bell?
I have not been able to find the case again since. It was a local shop that built it from parts, so it was not a big brand. I didn’t pick the parts either, since I knew nothing about PCs at the time, and it showed lol.
Edit: it was a white/beige mini tower. If I recall correctly, it was similar to a lot of cases at the time, with a black band across and a circular button on the right. The turbo and reset buttons were pink and teal in the shape of triangles. I purchased it in 1992 when I needed a PC for college.
I started on a DX2 66 MHz with 4 MB RAM and 420 MB HDD. 4 x 1 MB modules. Later upgraded to 20 MB RAM (added 4 x 4 modules) and a 1.2 GB Matrox HDD that need an extra driver to be used. With 20 MB I created a RAM drive, copied Doom to it and ran it - loaded real fast but frame rate was horrible.
That’s awesome. My 1993 self is very envious of your rig.
Yeah, mine was similar. Had some old Win95 machines from work that were getting thrown away; scavenged as much RAM as possible into one case and left Red Hat Linux downloading overnight on the company modem. Needed two boxes of floppy disks for the installer, and I joined up a 60 MB and an 80MB hard drive using LVM to create the installation drive. It was a surprisingly functional machine - much better at networking than it was as a Win95 computer - but yeah, those days are long gone.
I was running my Gateway 2000 486 sx33 with Linux did she extended amount of time as a router with NAT. I’ve still got it somewhere in the loft.
Complete with cow-print box?
My first was a rare CPU, but not that old. It was my first PC and was fanless, which I used to think was normal until years later. It was a VIA Cyrix III, maybe 32 MB RAM. Another interesting thing about this CPU was its overclock capabilities. I don’t know how it did survive my overclocking, since I genuinely didn’t have a clue, except that if I raised the numbers, KDE could run, but if I didn’t, well, Xfce was also cool.
Mone might even had been a Cyrix too. Honestly I struggle to remember. My dad bought straight Intels and I bought the clones (cheaper) I can’t remember which one I first started on, but both got it eventually.
both got it eventually
Yeah, this is the way.
You one-upper, you.
2 gigs of ram ? You probably can have an emulation station up to PS1 with this hardware.
Oh, I tried… But the CPU/GPU is just TOO slow for that, SNES was the best I could do
I always forget how crappy Intel iGPUs are.
Pretty close tho
Whilst the Celeron was indeed utter cack, 2 GB has me making four Yorkshiremen-style “2GB? Luxury!” style comments.
I used to run Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire 1362 WMLi back in 2005. I had 512 MB of RAM and a 2800+ Sempron processor.
That said, looking at this:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/1351vs710/Mobile-AMD-Sempron-2800+-vs-Intel-Celeron-M-1.60GHzMy old Sempron was a better CPU than that piece of junk Celeron you’ve got there. Giving it 2GB of RAM is hilarious!
Ikr? Makes me wonder what that celeron was meant for? It barely ran the Win 7 that came preinstalled. That’s why I’m so happy to see it run modern Debian with modern packages. Also why I’m doing some research on CPUs to upgrade it to
I assume it was made to upsell people to better CPUs. Celerons have always been awful.
That said, if Win7 came preinstalled then we’re talking about different eras of Celeron, at least, I cannot imagine it would be as mediocre as a low-mid AMD CPU from 2004!
I always think of an ex of mine defending criticism of her craptop. “It was good for its time!” No, no it wasn’t. It was built around a Celeron. It was built to be trash. It was ewaste with extra steps.
i started using linux on a single core pentium 4 with 384M of ram
Man, does 384 sound weird!
I know it was a 256 MB and a 128 MB stick… but it was a long time ago…
I was 14 years old, and I got the 128meg stick for free. Beggars can’t be choosers haha
I rushed to the comments when I saw a 1.6ghz CPU being called low end but I see OPs already been dealt with. I remember the first ever 1ghz CPU being an overclocked nitrogen cooled AMD Athlon. Me and my mates were all talking about it when it happened.
But why would a 1.6 ghz, single core CPU not be low end in 2025? Perfomance itself is very sluggish, and it has only been able to do very simple offline tasks for now. Yeah, yeah, many people used to run 512mb ram and 500mhz cpu setups… But that was in 2000 and whatever.
The post title says “ever” rather than “2025”. It’s cool for 2025 and we may get some interesting others, but many here will have ran it on something slower at some point.
Yes, the title say lowest I ever ran That was the lowest for me, I really don’t get the confusion. And even then, a celeron m 380 was lower end even for it’s own time
But why would a 1.6 ghz, single core CPU not be low end in 2025? Perfomance itself is very sluggish, and it has only been able to do very simple offline tasks for now. Yeah, yeah, many people used to run 512mb ram and 500mhz cpu setups… But that was in 2000 and whatever.
Hell yeah! Love seeing old hardware like this still running a modern OS.
With Linux, if your hardware is a decade old, you’ve barely even reached middle-age.
Meanwhile Windows 11 won’t even allow an official install on hardware that’s 4-5 years old.
Long live Linux & FOSS ✊
Celeron M with 2GB ram? That’s actually not low at all :p
I bet it runs NetBSD or Tinycore flawlessly
It ain’t high enough to do playback on VLC tho :p but can do some nice fun with it
maybe try mplayer/xine/mpv?
With no real GPU you’re gonna be limited to like DVD playback at best.
I’ll keep these in mind, hope debian still got 32 bit version of these packages.
Debian will not run on Pentium anymore. It is not performance, it is compiler options. You need a i686 (Pentium Pro). This means none of the Debian derivatives will either.
Adelie, Arch32, and T2 all still run on Pentium though I believe.
[edit: sorry, I saw Pentium 75 from the comment above - Celeron M should be fine]
Are you using systemd? Because 317 MB of RAM is really low for a normal Debian installation with XFce. At my mom’s 2 GB ram laptop, it uses 850 MB on a cold boot.
It is because it is 32 bit. You can run a 32 bit distro on your machine too if you really want.
You can get a full Trinity desktop on Q4OS in 130 MB of RAM (32 bit edition).
I don’t think the difference between 32bit and 64bit is 2x in memory sizes, it’s way less than that. I run Q4OS, it runs at 350 MBs here.
Are you running Trinity or KDE?
Not sure why I get so much less unless it is that. Or are you saying you run Trinity 64 bit?
I agree that 32 bit is not often going to be 50% less in practice. Sometimes I think we should be running 64 bit kernels with 32 bit userland.
Trinity of course. That’s the point of low end computing with Q4OS. :)
850 sounds crazy. maybe you forgot to subtract cached memory?
I’m telling you what htop reports.
I’ve run Linux on a 166MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM. There’s not much modern software that will run on that hardware though.
You would be surprised. If you stay text only and use a 32 bit distro, it would run up to date versions of most CLI programs.
Adelie and Arch32 still support Pentium.
Booting to a GUI, there are still a few options. I think Velox would run on that. I bet Xorg with FVWM would too. You are not going to have much left for apps though. However, you could run a couple of terminals.
Adelie Linux (totally modern Linux distro) lists 64 MB as the minimum server memory requirement.
I ran Damn Small Linux on it about 15 years ago. That worked pretty well and it would even run a web browser. It would probably boot Tiny Core Linux, but there wouldn’t be much RAM left to run any programs. The motherboard supports 128MB, but it’s not really worth the cost to upgrade it though.
I may see about resurrecting that computer. I’ve got an old Motorola police radio that I would like to reprogram to operate in the 2M ham band and I think that PC will run the programming software.
I have been operating a DNS-232 NAS with 32 MB RAM and ARM CPU with lighty webserver for a while. It could run MoinMoinWiki, written in Python 2, acceptably. Slowest thing I have tried to work on was a 386. But this one was slow - compiling the kernel took an eternity.
I’m pretty certain the first computer I installed Linux on was a Pentium 75 with 4MB of RAM. I know I ran it on some 486s booting off floppys at work. We were at 10,000 feet and couldn’t trust the lifespan of spinning rust.
