Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS for *very* old server hardware

[andrew clarke]

On Mon 2014-06-09 11:45:37 UTC+0200, Liam Proven (lproven at gmail.com) wrote:

> On 8 June 2014 09:14, Niki Kovacs <info at microlinux.fr> 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?
> 
> Not in under 128MB of RAM, no!

I've successfully booted Ubuntu Server 14.04 LTS 64-bit on a
VirtualBox VM with only 128 MB. It's a little slow though. Concievably
the Ubuntu Server installer won't run with only 128 MB (and no swap).

> Can you not find some old SDRAM and upgrade it a little? Even my old
> G3 Macs at home have 512MB or 1GB of RAM - old SDRAM DIMMs are so
> plentiful and cheap now, I max out every turn-of-the-century machine I
> get.

I'd recommend this too. The OP's Poweredge 1300 supports up to 1 GB, but
he needs to use ECC RAM which may be difficult to source.

> If you can get it to 1/2 GB or even 1GB then Debian will run on it fairly
> well, or Ubuntu Server if you do not install a GUI.

Even 256 MB is okay for a lightly-loaded server. It depends what
you're using it for.

Regards
Andrew