On Mon 05 May 2025 at 22:01:18 (+0200), Rafał Lichwała wrote: > Is it possible to install Debian on a VERY VERY OLD hardware? If so, > what "image" should I use?
See below. > Hardware spec: > > CPU: Intel Celeron 400MHz > RAM: 32MB > HDD: 6GB > BIOS year: 1998 > CD-ROM, FDD 1,4MB, RS-232, 1x USB 2.0 I ran woody 3.0 on a Texas Instruments 5000 laptop, Pentium 75MHz with 8MB memory, but it wouldn't run X 4.1. With 32MB, you might manage sarge 3.1, though I don't know whether it being only Celeron will have an influence. IIRC sarge introduced 2.6 kernels as an option. ISTR a lot of modern features were added with 2.6. I bought sarge on a 2-DVD set¹. My notes show it ran openoffice.org, XFree86 4.3 Xinerama 3D, exim4, and python 2.3 (→2.4). The non-US part of the distribution had just become obsolete, and debian-volatile appeared. One advantage of sarge over woody is that there's a debian-installer rather than just a disk set: http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/20050317sarge2/images/ versus http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/woody/main/disks-i386/ Good luck. ¹ I would have run sarge from 2005–2007 on two machines: Pentium II (Klamath) with 384MB Pentium III (Coppermine) with 512MB Cheers, David.
