I just hit the same issue a few days ago. So Debian 12 (Bookworm) still has i386 support, but that support may end as soon as next year as they haven’t confirmed i386 as an architecture for LTS.
If you do go with Debian, you can easily choose a lightweight desktop during installation.
I didn’t look too far into it yet. I know that Bookworm is good until 2026, though there is a big TBD on whether i386 is part of the 2028 LTS. I guess I have a minimum of another year to figure it out. Not that I do much with 2008 hardware to begin with.
I JUST got done posting about LXQt rescuing old hardware earlier today, found out about this news, booted up my laptop to perform a Debian Trixie upgrade in preparation… only to find out that my Pentium M is too old to rescue. Debian dropped i386.
so instead of defaults I think you want noauto,nofail
Then it shouldn’t automatically mount, but at the same time won’t throw you into emergency mode if it fails to detect the drive.
I tried XFCE for some older hardware and had the same experience.
I poked around at stuff like fluxbox and found it too minimal. So I ended up using LXDE instead and got better results, but that was before it transitioned to LXQt. I have no idea if it’s still as lightweight as it used to be. Someone else might have to chime in.
Interesting. The Zero W is still in active production, with production promises all the way to 2030. I would not want to be in the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s shoes right now.
which is funny because firmware is a legacy term for what evolved into what is honestly software.
You don’t need to socket any new chips nowadays.
I had dabbled with Linux over the years, starting with Lubuntu reviving an old Dell 120L during college. When I moved to university they gave us all Macbooks to work with in the IT department. OS X never clicked with me, so I set up a VM with Linux to perform my day to day work. I instantly became the Linux guy because of that… so any tickets that came in for Linux troubleshooting got routed to me.
It just sort of made sense to try a Linux build after that, since I couldn’t afford a Windows license after I lost access to MSDN.
Oh! I know this one! ReactOS!
If using era-appropriate hardware, I wonder if you could use archived Kubuntu repos to upgrade one at a time until it’s a modern Linux kernel.
The first thing I did when I migrated was look for foobar2000, as I knew it rivaled Winamp in compatibility. Couldn’t find a Linux client. Only Windows/Mac. Unfortunately it looks like Audio Overload went Mac only, but the legacy 2.0 version is still available for Linux so I might give that a try.
A combination of PSF/NSF/2SF/USF, various PCM streams, along with stuff like VGM, GBS and SPC.
Winamp. It’s the only audio software that supports tons of game audio formats.
I got it running in WINE, but file association has been a pain and every single time WINE launches my system locks up for a good 30 seconds.
What’s IPX?
I once asked my college professor of computer networking to explain IPX to me and this was the response I got.
Reminds me of the old Debian OpenSSL vulnerability that went unnoticed for 2 years… but it did eventually get noticed.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2008/msg00152.html
I tried so hard to get Debian working on my new build. Problem being: it’s a new build. Debian’s glacial pacing meant my hardware won’t see support for a while. I might try again when Trixie finally releases, but I’m not getting my hopes up.
So I guess my answer is… I’ll distro hop when stability & support reach equal levels.
You should have seen the panic back in 2017 when my team found a cluster of Server 2003 running at a hospital.
The client thought it was fine.