[kwlug-disc] Maintained distro for very old CPUs

[peter_melse at gto.net]

It might be worth looking into Puppy, or similar.
If you've got a machine to cross compile stuff as needed, Gentoo might 
be a good option.
As always, a search of distrowatch.org may be useful.


On 2020-05-25 08:15, Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
> I have some ancient AMD Geode ALIX boards. They are x86 compatible (I
> think they may be i586 compatible, but maybe not i686) but neither
> Debian nor Ubuntu will run on them because the kernels don't have the
> right support compiled in. So I am looking for another distro that (a)
> was not abandoned in 2003 and (b) will run adequately on this
> hardware. I only need commandline Linux, but having maintained
> packages (eg OpenSSH) is important. The systems have compact flash
> cards, not real hard drives. They come with 256MB RAM.
> 
> What are my best options? So far it seems that NetBSD might run
> on them. Another possibility is Tiny Core Linux. Are there any better
> options? Obviously I cannot make too many demands on them, but given
> that one of these was running pfSense for over five years they are
> capable of running a few things well.
> 
> - Paul