On year 1999 hardware, would a 1996 distro be faster than TC?

[Ulysses_]

I've got an ancient set of redhat CD's from 1996, some 3 of them.  Also considering other distros to install. 

It's for a hardware from 1999 (celeron 400 MHz, 384 MB ram).

1. Would any of the distros of that era be faster than TC?

2. Would the security be better in an obscure distro of days gone by, than one of today's well-known distros that all decent hackers have exploits for?

[ACRizona]

Absolutely none are faster than TinyCore.   
( source: My stack of old CDs is taller than yours ! )

"Decent hacker" 
 If you're a decent bank-robber, I doubt it would matter.

The problem is that new application software is horribly bloated to the point that it is useless on a celeron400.   

But, I'm sooo stubborn,,, I recently found this gem in a forum somewhere;
" The fastest web browser for a old PC is Opera 5 ".

Just for grins, I tried it on my rusty Pent266.  He's right !

     

[Guy]

You will probably find that Tiny Core is more secure, particularly if you use the firewall. Although the old versions of Linux are probably not targeted.

An internet browser from 1996 is probably not compatible with much of the modern internet content.

[curaga]

Older software will run faster, usually. But then very few older distros ran in RAM, and the speed difference of RAM<>HD was much bigger back then. Since there's quite enough ram to run TC comfortably, and TC nests fine, install both

Security? Well, while the older one is more obscure, all it takes is a trip to the CVE archives for version X of component Y, and there you have working exploits.

[curaga]

I should mention that 2.6 kernels, while bigger and more bloated, tend to have much improved algorithms over 2.4 and much more so over 2.2 kernels.

CPU, IO schedulers; networking is a big one too. On the same hardware, a 2.6 kernel firewall could handle near double the traffic compared to 2.4 IIRC.

[tinypoodle]

Agreeing with curaga in principle, but if using old software then I would rather try basiclinux which is based on and compatible with slackware 4.0 and designed specifically for old PCs - as opposed to a red hat version from 1996...
Also, basiclinux can run either from a loop file or in a ramdisk.

Regarding opera, I would prefer 6.0 over 5, difference in resource use not being that big, but opera 6.0 amongst other has netscape plugin compatibility. flashplayer 9 would actually work with certain sites   

[Ulysses_]

"Decent hacker" 
 If you're a decent bank-robber, I doubt it would matter.

Replace decent with reasonably capable.

[Ulysses_]

Regarding benchmarks, I tried peacekeeper on TC and other linuxes and o/s's on my modern hardware, and got results that varied too much with each run on the same configuration. Here are some results:

Windows 2k sp4 dx9 installed, firefox 3.6.12 800mb: 1017, 796, 684, 1063
ubuntu 10.10, firefox, liveCD 800mb: 761, 587
Pcbsd 8.1 64bit installed, firefox 3.6.4 raw 400mb:  599, 585
TC 3.3, opera 10.10 800mb: 436, 417, 419, 564, 455, 389
ubuntu 10.10, opera 10.10, liveCD 800mb: 453, 453, 384, 459, 469, 432
Pcbsd 7.1.1 64bit inst, firefox 3.5 raw 400mb:  478, 374, 488, 535, 550
vectorlinux, opera 10.11 400mb: 294, 338, 335, 310, 310, 285
VirtualBSD, firefox 3.0.5 400mb: 194, 264, 238, 210, 203

This is inside VM's on a windows XP host. 

Something must be wrong with this benchmark, maybe it's not factoring out tcp/ip transfer delays and bandwidths.   Any other benchmark?