Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS for *very* old server hardware

[Nils Kassube]

Niki Kovacs wrote:
> I'm currently on a Linux training mission for a company in South
> France, and just for the fun of it, I resurrected a very old server
> from the server cabinet and put Slackware Linux 14.1 32-bit on it.
> The server is a Dell Poweredge 1300, roughly 15 (!) years old,
> equipped with a Pentium-III 500 MHz processor, 110 MB RAM and 3 x 9
> SCSI disks (which I configured with a software RAID 5). Slackware
> runs very nice on this old dinosaur, we managed to get DHCPD, Bind,
> NTP, Squid+SquidGuard, Apache and some other things to run on it.
> 
> As far as I know (and please correct me if I'm wrong), newer versions
> of Ubuntu don't boot on these very old processors. Now here's my
> question : are there eventually some alternate installation CDs of
> Ubuntu Server (I'm interested in the 12.04 LTS version) that would
> boot on this old machine?

The problem is that recent Ubuntu versions don't run on CPUs which don't
support PAE. For 12.04 there were non-PAE kernel versions but they were
not on the install images. But for 12.04 there was a workaround - a
netboot version for non-PAE CPUs. Here you can find the ISO image:

<http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/non-pae/mini.iso>

But you can't upgrade that version to newer Ubuntu releases because
there are no non-PAE kernels available and the release upgrader refuses
to upgrade anyway. Of course you can compile your own kernels, but it
will still be a bit tricky to do the release upgrade.


Nils