Adélie Linux 1.0 – small, fast, but not quite grown up Beta 6 of Adélie Linux is arriving, just over six years after Beta 1 – but they do say that good things come to those who wait. Adélie Linux 1.0-BETA6 is the latest installment in a remarkably protracted beta-testing stage: 1.0-BETA1 appeared in September 2018, and the project started back in 2015. Adélie (the name is taken …
I've been looking for something suitable for an old 2008ish era Core2Duo laptop for a while now. This feels like it might fit the bill rather perfectly....it's been running MX Linux happily for the past year but that feels just a touch heavy in terms of CPU load these days.
Was thinking of giving Bodhi Linux a go but this sounds like a good option too.
The announcement says "smartphones, game consoles, '90s-era PCs, and supercomputers" but the website has generic download images targeted at CPU/flavour/GUI, but it seems to me we should be seeing more than that, targeted at each device.
I don't see anything anywhere about how to install on a PowerPC Mac or a console or a smartphone. After all, the same PowerPC image wouldn't work on all Power Macs from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s, and an XBox 360, PS3, GameCube, and a Wii. And LineageOS custom ROM images for smartphones are individual to each device so why wouldn't this distro be too?
Yes, they're not being entirely honest there. Not only do they have no images that you could deploy on a smartphone, but they seem to have no software intended to provide a smartphone interface. Their compatibility guide lists only typical desktops and laptops, although a lot of PowerPC Macs are supported. On that topic, I don't think you would need anything that unusual to install it, as it's also going to involve writing the image to bootable media and selecting it in the boot manager. They also seem to support only one SBC, the Pine64 A64, and otherwise you're on your own to make the ARM versions boot right.
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Useable but not smooth yet, they have work to do.
Netsurf, Abiword and Atril installed from the repository in the live session with a full xfce4 desktop with free showing 236 Mb ram and top showing load averages around 0.1 is pretty ok.
LXQT image would not boot to graphical live, stopped at a missing font file. Would boot to cli and I was able to get twm up with Xorg. LXQT complaining about a lack of platform.
Have left a comment on the blog post as I could not find any direct contact information. I could have signed up to the git issue tracker but that seems not to be used for general bug reports.
When reproducing the bug (intermittent tendency to not boot into the live graphical session on the LXQT iso for i386) I once got dropped into a debug prompt that allowed me to save a full dmesg with some extra info to a USB stick about the state of the system. Now THAT is a useful thing!
While I only have a couple (practically one) remaining, I do appreciate their work to continue supporting 32-bit systems. It almost makes me wish I still had an old PPC Mac from yesteryear. And ISTR reading Adelie had plans for SPARC as well, though that presumably remains to be seen.
My little i386/i686 PC is running FreeBSD today, recently upgraded to 14.2, but as 15.0 is expected to drop support, the days are numbered. I'd been thinking NetBSD will be the thing at that point, and that's still the most likely landing, but I do keep an eye out for Linux possibilities. The candidates seem to be few, and shrinking.
Debian plans to drop 32-bit x86 releases, and I've assumed that will likely be the end of 32-bit MX Linux too; we'll see what happens. I've only test driven MX on a desktop for a bit after Liam's prior review, but I came away with a favorable impression. Using it for small server duty would likely not be a big hurdle.
That said, Alpine would be my next likely choice for 32-bit x86 Linux in small configs.
Though my i686 (VIA C7) has a whopping 1GB RAM (!!), and I've beefed up the storage a bit and even added a 1Gb PCI NIC, it's still a small system and I typically only use it for lightweight server duties. Alpine or NetBSD would presumably be fine. Might be worth trying Adelie too, though as noted in TFA, the focus seems to be more desktop than small server. Still, it's on the list, so well-done to all involved.
My ITX VIA C7 board deaded itself last month: the capacitors are rather swollen now.
It'll have to go to recycling, I've already shoe-horned an eBayed mATX mobo into its old case, but it will be a wrench.
That brave little board always gave its best. I should put it into a shoebox and give it a proper send off. Look, its i/o shield is still so shiny! Sob.
That only leaves one dual core 32-bit ITX board still running (it ran the house file server all on its own until 2020) and a stack of older Raspberry Pi's. And the Beaglebones. Come to think of it, there are still quite a few 32-bit systems sitting around here, doing odd jobs every now and again.
While I only have a couple (practically one) remaining, I do appreciate their work to continue supporting 32-bit systems.
I have AntiX running on an old Thinkpad. It works, in the sense that it runs, but it's almost unusably slow. Fifteen years ago Ubuntu was running very nicely and usably on the same machine. Usable support seems to be a lot harder to do than just support.
> it's almost unusably slow.
Sir will of course be aware that I have reviewed antiX as well.
It is impressive in several ways but it's not that small or that fast.
For comparison, although it looks like it may have died yesterday, my Core 2 Duo Thinkpad W500 currently boots:
• XP64
• OpenBSD
• NetBSD
• Crunchbang
• Alpine
Crunchbang++ is allegedly one of the slimmest Debian 12 derivatives.
It takes as much RAM as Alpine takes disk.
Debian is not a lightweight distro and there isn't much you can do to make it lighter. The Raspberry Pi Desktop (the x86 edition) is about as light as Debian gets -- they've pruned it to about half the disk and a quarter of the RAM -- and it's impressive but I think it's about as far as anyone can go. And there is no Debian 12 version.
The BSDs are not much lighter than Debian. They're all general-purpose Unixes.
Sad to say, XP64 is by far the quickest and most responsive OS on that machine. XP64 is little bigger than ordinary XP, although of course it needs special drivers and things -- but they're out there, thanks to Windows Server 2003 doing well -- and you can get a recent, useful Mozilla-based and Chrome-based browser. You can get VLC, 7zip, Notepad++, Irfanview, and a whole load of useful _current_ stuff.
If I didn't feel like I was doing a tightrope walk over a canyon full of pirañhas and crocodiles every time I went online with it...
With its necessarily complex partitioning scheme for all those OSes, ArcaOS couldn't even parse the partition table. It would probably be faster still, but it is 32-bit of course... and XP can run a far newer Firefox (68 vs 45).
Can vouch for Crunchbang++ as feeling pretty lightweight and snappy. I've had it running for a while on a 2013 era Intel NUC (Celeron 847E) and it works pretty well given how weak the thing's specs are by modern standards. Web browsing isn't great unless you use Falkon or something like Links, but for basic office stuff it's still usable.
OMG IT WILL FIT ON A CD!!
(* adelie-live-xfce-x86_64-1.0-beta6-20241214.iso 640MB)
Yes, I remember bringing in 2 packs of new 1.2M floppies because you didn't always get twenty perfect diskettes in two boxes. And I remember my first time a linux ISO failed because it had grown past CD size and now DVD size; that was some years back (Puppy was scraping the limit for a while).
AHHH-- it "must" have network for install, so it can fetch stuff not in the "CD" ISO. It comes up with LYNX! Reasonable. And NetSurf, cute, functional. In VirtualBox, screen defaulted to 1280 by 800, reasonable; no 1200px dialogs in 640px display.
The result is tiny enough to be realistically usable on a 32-bit machine, as this vulture is old enough to feel Linux jolly well ought to be,
Hear, hear!
I used to run Lubuntu on my Asus EeePC701 (the woman on the beach icon is, alas, no more) and the entire installation plus applications fitted onto a 1.5GB / partition. Nowadays the install download for Lubuntu is 3,1GB. Lightweight my arse.
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