CHALLENGE ACCEPTED !!

[polikuo]

A friend of mine challenged me to boot TC via the crappiest PC he could find.

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED !! 

Let's see what we've got ...

CPU: Intel Celeron FV524RX300 (300MHz) with 128K L2 cache, over clock to 450MHz
Mother Board: GIGABYTE GA-6VXE7+
RAM: SYNNEX PC-133 64M
Graphic Card: AGP-SIXX
Hard Disk: HITACHI 80G IDE
Sound Card: I have a USB sound card, just gotta dig it out
Internet: Currently unavailable, maybe I'll get a working net card someday

Does it boot ?
Sure it does. 



Tiny Core KERNEL: 8.1rc2 32-bit
Boot Loader: SYSLINUX (EXTLINUX) 6.03
X server: Xvesa 800X600X15
SWAP: 5G

Wait, I thought you just said 64M of RAM ?
Does the X server even run ?
Seriously, don't you see the picture above? 

How about compiling some stuffs ?
Why not ?
Let's do a simple "Hello World!"



Yep, you read it right.
Elapsed time: 30 seconds  just for a line of Hello World!
Memory usage please refer to the image.
(Sorry with the quality of the image  )

Is there anything else you wanna try it out ?
Comment below.
I may try it if I have the time 

[Rich]

Hi polikuo
I can't tell if you used it but try  nozswap  in the  APPEND  line. That should free up a little more RAM.

Your image resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels for the screen shots is a bit excessive. Scrolling on my browser actually
becomes a bit jerky because it's busy rescaling the image to fit the page every time it's scrolled into view. Maybe you
could go for something in the 800 x 600 range?

[Rich]

Hi polikuo
You won't be able to edit your post because it's been more than 30 minutes since you wrote it, but if you PM me links
to a couple of rescaled pictures I'll edit the post for you.

[polikuo]

Hi polikuo
I can't tell if you used it but try  nozswap  in the  APPEND  line. That should free up a little more RAM.

I don't have that code, will try it.

Your image resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels for the screen shots is a bit excessive. Scrolling on my browser actually
becomes a bit jerky because it's busy rescaling the image to fit the page every time it's scrolled into view. Maybe you
could go for something in the 800 x 600 range?

Adjusted, I think it's OK now.

Hi polikuo
You won't be able to edit your post because it's been more than 30 minutes since you wrote it, but if you PM me links
to a couple of rescaled pictures I'll edit the post for you.

I edit the file on imgur, I believe it should be fine since the forum links to them.

Sound Card: I have a USB sound card, just gotta dig it out
Internet: Currently unavailable, maybe I'll get a working net card someday

BTW, USB audio card totally works with alsa on this machine. 
In fact, the music plays smoothly. 
(Tested with both wav and mp3 file format.  )

There's no net card around me, I hope it'll work out just like the audio card when I eventually get one.

[Rich]

Hi polikuo

Adjusted, I think it's OK now.

Thank you, that's perfect.

[Rich]

Hi polikuo

Yep, you read it right.
Elapsed time: 30 seconds  just for a line of Hello World!

To be fair, if you're compiling, the elapsed time of the first run is typically slower than any subsequent runs. I'll put numbers
behind that statement with a quote by myself from an old thread:

[ ... SNIP ... ] I've also seen it suggested to run cache-clear periodically in the background
to boost the reported amount of free memory, this is a bad idea. To demonstrate, the program I am
currently working on takes 2 seconds to compile. After running cache-clear it takes 10 seconds to
compile, and if I compile it again it's back to 2 seconds. It runs faster because the memory manager
is keeping the most recently used data in RAM. [ ... SNIP ... ]

Of course there is the possibility that with your memory constraints there isn't enough RAM to cache anything long enough
to be of use later on.

[polikuo]

Hi polikuo

Yep, you read it right.
Elapsed time: 30 seconds  just for a line of Hello World!

To be fair, if you're compiling, the elapsed time of the first run is typically slower than any subsequent runs. I'll put numbers
behind that statement with a quote by myself from an old thread:

[ ... SNIP ... ] I've also seen it suggested to run cache-clear periodically in the background
to boost the reported amount of free memory, this is a bad idea. To demonstrate, the program I am
currently working on takes 2 seconds to compile. After running cache-clear it takes 10 seconds to
compile, and if I compile it again it's back to 2 seconds. It runs faster because the memory manager
is keeping the most recently used data in RAM. [ ... SNIP ... ]

Of course there is the possibility that with your memory constraints there isn't enough RAM to cache anything long enough
to be of use later on.

Actually, the first time I built hello.c, it took only 15 seconds.
I forgot to take a picture so I re-run gcc for photographing.
Noticing the time had changed, I kept retrying.
The more I do, the slower it gets, until it reaches 30 seconds.
I believe it's due to the swapping process, the hard drive rattles when I compile.
Guess there really isn't enough RAM to cache anything long enough. 

[PDP-8]

Then again, I wonder how long it would take to compile hello.c on say the typical workstations of yesteryear, like the Sun 3/80 pizzabox for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-3

Or maybe even a NeXT box! etc etc.

From that perspective, your machine would be the ultimate dream.  I'd hang on to it and stop laughing at it.

[andyj]

I have a K6-300 I booted it on a few weeks ago so I could clean off the disks before I recycle it. I didn't try the GUI, but downloading hdparm and e2fsprogs was easy enough. The problem with old computers isn't booting an OS, it's POSTing because the CMOS batteries are all dead.