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What is the best modern-ish OS to install on older computers? (Parameters within)
By "modern-ish" I mean support for wifi, USB, etc. Maybe modern is the wrong word, but "not prehistoric" fits better? I primarily want to use these machines for some old school mudding. Bonus points for a browser that works with encryption to make web browsing somewhat usable.
Computer #1: "Ole trusty"
This one came with the OG Windows NT. I've toyed with FreeBSD installs from version 4 to 7 or so. Right now I believe it has Windows 95 or 98.
- Compaq / Pentium
- 3.25" disk drive
- Broken CD-ROM and I haven't found a plug-and-play replacement yet, even though I've tried 3 or 4. I can get it to work by forcing the tray open and closed, but I'm certain the tray is going to snap soon.
- I've replaced the hard drive with a compact flash
- Right now it has a PCI LAN adapter, but I have the option to replace this with a wifi adapter (Linksys I believe)
Computer #2: "MTV was still cool"
This one's running Windows 3.1 at the moment. It's going to be much tougher to get a network connection going. Is it possible to do some sort of modem-to-wifi bridge?
- Compaq / 386
- 5 1/2" and 3.25" disk drives, no CD ROM
- Compact flash HD
- It has a modem, I'm not sure how fast. I'm also not sure how many expansion slots are left.
Ultimately, your BSDs or Linuxes are gonna be your only viable options. Also the amount of RAM is going to be the biggest limiter for either. I remember my first Pentium computer got a upgrade to a huge 8MB of RAM. A lot of Linux distros consider 256MB "low" these days, as well as generally dropping support for anything older than a Pentium II. The one exception would be Gentoo, which I would cross-compile on a modern PC, and just directly format and drop the files on the CF. This would probably work best on Computer 1
If manually installing Gentoo via cross-compile seems too daunting, I'd suggest OpenBSD, as they still release 3.25 floppy installs for i386. You could also probably directly install via a modern machine the same way, but I've not looked into it too hard.
For networking (eBay links for example pricing, not necessarily the best pricing):
You can get an ISA Ethernet expansion card for the 386:
Then I would just pick up an old WRT54G and slap FreshTomato on it. Use it as the wireless gateway for both in client mode. Fun fact: Odds are that router has more compute power than either of these machines...possibly put together. If you do end up doing this setup, please report back with some benchmarks of all three machines.
This will be much faster than expecting such old machines to handle WiFi. As well as not needing to completely sacrifice your security to get them online....Freshtomato can connect with WPA2.
I'd be surprised if either of these things could max out a 10Mb hub, let a lone a 100Mb switch that the WRT54G has.
OP, if you wind up being stuck on an older OS but wish to follow the network advice above, you might consider setting up a proxy machine to handle rendering web pages and serving them to your retro clients. Two worth looking at:
Web Rendering Proxy
Browservice
The former serves up pages as a static image with a clickable overlay, making it compatible with Mosaic and onwards. The latter builds on this by running a Javascript component on the client to allow for things like text input, but this comes at the cost of needing a more powerful vintage machine and late-90s browser.
Ooh, this is an interesting direction to go in!
I hadn’t known about the rendering proxy projects yet, that’s pretty cool. In case you’re CPU- and bandwidth-limited, you may consider setting up Browsh, which I’d say does the same thing… but over a text-only terminal, no images (using headless firefox to render on the server).
So the quality/fidelity isn’t as up to par as with your two options, but it is definitely usable, albeit quite a bit more geeky. :P
Why are you trying to use 40-ish year old computers? Not to sound to dismissive, but there is likely no way that you'd be able to get a web browser trying to connect to any non-text-only website working at this point. Super-cheap Orange Pi Zero 3W has Ethernet, HDMI, 1 GB of RAM, Wifi, Bluetooth, and the 1.5 GB of RAM edition is $27.
The amount of work and pain you're going to go through trying to resurrect a 386 (unless you're wanting to do DOS and vintage computing...but that's not what you've asked for) and have it behave like a "modern" machine isn't worth it. You can definitely spend less money than your time is worth getting something more modern working that will just work better.
If you're just looking to run an "old school MUD" (while this isn't a world I'm into) there's a number of different MUD tools, servers, clients, and projects out there that I was able to find easily that can be the same experience without the agony.
I love vintage computing and hate e-waste as much or more than the next person, but also value my time.
Hobbies are hobbies. Why do people bother trying to get Doom to run on pregnancy tests? I use my WRT54g from 2003 to provide isolated wifi access for the idiot smart devices for 3W, which is a lot less than almost any other wireless router these days.
Plus, you can easily browse a fair bit of the web with text-based browsers. At least, if you're not looking for web apps disguised as websites.
I personally force my kid to play Minecraft on a Bulldozer AMD laptop so that they can understand what the progression of computing since then feels like. Spoiler: Not as much as you would think. Once you throw an SSD in it and max out the RAM doesn't really feel significantly worse for daily driving, provided you're not trying to decode modern video codecs.
Exactly. It's a fun hobby that I don't expect to provide anything except some self-satisfaction and a dose of nostalgia. I'm not looking for speed or 8K graphics here... I'm more interested in the hum of the CRT monitor, the clank of an old keyboard, and the whir of the hard drive (even though I've ripped those out).
Fair, and so long as you’re signing up for pain and frustration, enjoy!
Slackware or Debian might be your best shots for something that will likely run.
If going with Linux, I'd pick one that doesn't use (or has the option not to use) systemd, as I've found that can crank up the system requirements (RAM, CPU, etc.) compared to older-school init systems.
Slackware, Void (my personal choice), Gentoo, maybe even Alpine would probably be better than Debian. (Unless Debian has the option to use a lighter-weight init system, I've not tried it any time recently so I don't know.) Also I think any of the BSDs should be an option, but they might present a tougher challenge to get all the hardware and any peripherals functional.
Q4OS worked on a pentium 2 for me, can have fun with KolibriOS as well.
I was also going to suggest KolibriOS for Computer 1 - it only needs 8MB of RAM and can run on any i586 machine. Would also be able to support modern components like USB and Ethernet. Though not entirely sure if it could handle a PCI USB expansion card (the machine might have USB 1.0/1.1 but didn't want to make any assumptions), but worth a shot.
For computer 2, you could pretty easily set up SLIP/PPP over serial to your other computer using a null modem cable. Or a raspberry pi if you don’t want them tethered.
For computer #2 I'd be tempted to keep the OS you have on it and see if you can find copies of software of the era to make it the 386 you wished it was at the time. It could be a fun way to play late 80s, early 90s PC games, maybe try out some coding on the Borland suite. There were a few DOS based web browsers that came later, but should be 386 compatible (Arachne comes to mind) as well as IRC clients.
For computer 1, I would probably try out haiku. It’s going to be fast because it’s made to reimplement a 90s operating system but it supports newer things as well. It’s also a wonderful desktop experience overall with some great ideas.
For computer 2 windows 3.1 is probably good enough. But if you want something new and currently supported that will work on it the only real option is FreeDOS. For an interesting new to you experience you might try something like breadbox ensemble which you can get from winworld. For networking I would probably use something like a Wifi232 or other esp32 based PPP/SLIP solution.
You're extremely limited on Linux options as backports likely won't even go back far enough to cover a 386 or Pentium CPU.
I had an AMD K6-2/350 that I attempted to install a modern distro on and all 32 bit distros failed due to the lack of CMOV instructions. I found one Debian Squeeze backport which allowed me to be able to install it and have working SSL certificates that allowed the machine to get online.
Honestly, it'll be more trouble than it's worth to attempt to get either system online if that's on your list of things planned for either system.
32 bit CPUs are largely abandoned due to the lack of instruction sets modern (within the last 20 years) kernels require... and that 386 is 16bit.
This is before you consider other issues... such as specs to even boot an OS. Amount of ram, for example. Whether or not the video card in either system even still has drivers in the kernel, as well.
They're period pieces, at best.
I think the biggest issue you may face is regarding RAM usage. How much does each machine have? Modernish software uses quite a bit, even the "slim" pieces of software, due to how much RAM a modernish machine is assumed to have.
Is command-line only acceptable? If you're trying to get a modernish GUI running on this, you may run into problems. You'll probably want to use a basic tiling window manager/compositor like
dwmif so. Lynx supports https and modern encryption IIRC.As for actual suggestions... you mentioned using FreeBSD on the one computer. I think that at least trying to use one of the newer versions of it could be useful. Going the BSD route, you may want to look into NetBSD since it's pretty minimal.
Failing that, you'd probably want to run some minimal flavour of Linux with 32-bit support. Vanilla Archlinux, for instance, is out, since it dropped 32 bit support (which I discovered in a painful manner one day), but there's an Archlinux32 distro you may want to check out since it seems active. Another option is Debian. With hardware that old, though, depending on your comfort with tech, I'd probably suggest trying out Gentoo with minimal USE flags and a
distccserver set up to compile packages and kernels specifically for those machines (since otherwise it may take forever).I'd throw a warning: Even most lightweight Linux distros today consider 256MB of RAM low. Most have dropped support for i586 machines which is probably what Computer 1 is, and certainly for i386 machines (computer 2). Either of these machines probably tops out at 32MB of ram, best case.
The BSD variants will get you a lot farther.
i586is the "codename" of the Pentium. Computer 2 will need something built for i386 if it actually is a 386.I hedged my "probably" because I recall that there were motherboards that supported 486 and Pentium CPUs back then.
Throwing Damn Small Linux into the ring, having seen a resurgence earlier this year. Its current incarnation is a spin-off of AntiX, itself a Debian derivative, and it can run on very low spec machines while still attempting to be a complete desktop distribution. Obviously it won't pull off any miracles regarding browsing the web, but the overall experience should be usable.