Will TinyCore run on a 486 / 32mb

[mrstarr]

I understand that some Linux distros are compiled with Pentium optimizations for speed to take advantage of new features that were implemented starting with the Pentium processor, and really old ones are not. 

Is Tiny Core compiled without these optimizations, so that it will run on a 486?  I have a *lot* of 486s.


From my experiments running TC on a thin client with 100mb, there is not a whole lot lot you can do with a lack of ram.  The only webrowser you can use is links2, and you can open a few text editors and an mp3 player, and that's about that. 

I'm thinking a machine with only 32mb, you're not going to be able to do much of anything in TinyCore...  one app running and that's about it.


As such, Windows 95 still seems a lot more optimized for such machines...  you can still run an old version of Opera on them and open some games... and on such low end machines, Tiny doesn't seem... Tiny.

The original Mac OS to me seems tiny... the whole thing ran on anywhere from 600K to 1 mb, depending on how loaded you had it with extensions.  A 4mb Mac SE, I could open a ton of stuff.




   

[Juanito]

Is Tiny Core compiled without these optimizations, so that it will run on a 486?  I have a *lot* of 486s.

tc should run on an i486

[gerald_clark]

32M is a problem though.
http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/faq.html#req

[maro]

32M is a problem though. ...

To right. OTOH if one truly understands the limitations it might be possible to use a "scatter mode" installation (plus plenty of swap space on disk). I guess it all depends what one expects to achieve with such old hardware.

I did not that long ago an experiment along those lines, but I'd consider it entirely unusable for running any half-decent browser. But (and here comes the BIG, FAT warning) any user going down this path will be on it's own. The Core team will not provide any support, and probably none of the knowledgeable "regulars" would want to spend much time to help someone going against the considered advice.

BTW I find a comparison between W95 which was released ca. 16 years ago and required (according to this source) 8 MB RAM and TC 3.x (released last year) a bit pointless. At least in the case of TC you get a system that can support a lot (if not almost all) of older (plus the current) hardware. In the "other corner" you get a system that I seriously doubt to be able to run on anything new (due to the increases in RAM and disk sizes that can't be supported by it, plus the fact that one won't get any drivers for pretty much any of the other system components). OTOH I would not suggest to run any old Linux version. Well, if this time line is correct then Linux 2.0 had not even come out when W95 shipped first. I really don't want to go on too much about it, but I for one believe that TC compares quite favourably WRT RAM requirements against current MSFT offers as well as the BIG (and IMHO much more bloated) "cousins" (e.g. Ubuntu).