Gentoo Linux on a 133Mhz Pentium! (feat. Linux 6, and NsCDE.. Again) | WGEX

[@David_Phantom]

For mocp, was the alsa USE flag in the flag list in the make.conf file in /etc/portage? I don't remember if I made the /mnt/endme folder, but I might've when I was doing chroot stuff to fix things. Also, you installed a LOT more than I thought you did! Awesome job and great perseverance! Not deleting the swap file might've helped... or made things slower! Who knows? Not me!

[@Ozzy_Helix_]

hey man

[@tobiwonkanogy2975]

a pata ssd and the best ram might make it ever so slightly more capable XD. still nuts for real. almost modern in some ways.

[@kantraa]

man took "install gentoo" literally

[@zach446]

you didn't? 🕴️

[@fnkcgxgkgcfu]

no i did arch ​@@zach446

[@peterpanther8627]

man?

[@smugay]

@@peterpanther8627two years ago

[@maikeru6158]

I recently got into Gentoo and for some reason immediately got interested in seeing it run on retro hardware. I’ve been waiting for this video

[@WindowsG]

Hope you enjoy it!~ ^-^

[@maikeru6158]

@@WindowsG I certainly will. Also I dare you install it from scratch, I predict it will take a few months to compile everything lol

[@bhstone1]

You pronounced "gentoo" incorrectly. You said "gentoo" but it's actually pronounced "gentoo". Thank you for correcting this.

[@SirenaWF1]

A 133Mhz PC was the speed of my first PC.

[@pnnytx]

My dad used to rock 133MHz 486 PC until 2001

[@mistrotech8894]

I used a 600mhz Pentium III, and I managed to watch some KZbin videos and browse the web. I used a distro called Slitaz. Old PCs are completely usable, and I used a 2003 Gateway tablet PC as my main computer up until about 2 years ago when I got a newer Thinkpad.

[@RedSntDK]

I have an older ~2007 EeePC, 1.6 GHz atom PC that I installed AntiX linux on, and it plays videos just fine, it's just that modern websites are so bloated that my initial 1GB ram wasn't cutting it, even if the OS was less than 300 MB from a fresh boot, 700 MB just doesn't cut it anymore when loading KZbin. Upgraded to 2GB which helped a lot, because swap on spinning rust isn't the best alternative. Glad you're on newer hardware now though.

[@CyroTheSpider]

I made my Voodoo 3 work on Gentoo. You have to compile the framebuffer tdfxfb driver, not the legacy DRM one. I also compiled it in, not as a module. It should pick up your monitor's resolution automatically after it loads (on the console). I also remember it working on Debian years ago, but I had to modprobe it manually, was compiled as a module. It works with a 1920x1080 monitor for me and it detects it automatically. After that, to get X working, you need to make sure it loads the xf86-video-fbdev driver, that's what the framebuffer drivers work on. It still won't be great, though. The X11 architecture just isn't there in the modern days to work properly with framebuffer based drivers. And you can forget the original old accelerated drivers. They haven't worked for over a decade now. The tdfx kernel driver is deprecated due to being DRI1 (they were unsafe). The X11 driver also doesn't work anymore because X11 dropped support for XAA (which the userspace X driver was based on). It might be possible to get this old acceleration stuff working if you compile an old 2.xx kernel with old 8.x Mesa and some ancient version of X11. But it quickly becomes a nightmare to try and get all the dependencies working together, especially with modern compilers.

[@raven4k998]

but can it run Crysis me thinks nope!!!

[@L-in-oleum]

I am *so* sorry for pointing out the lack of bottom bar, causing you and David to Install Gentoo™ on a P1 machine :P 1280x1024 resolution w/o video acceleration on a machine that old... I'm surprised it's still that usable.

[@David_Phantom]

Who needs video acceleration when you can just torture a CPU?

[@Malheirods]

It helped me. I wanted to run nsCDE no matter the distro on a PIII. One of the dependencies listed on their website "requires" SSE2, which PIII's don't have. I think it's Python3. When the bar was not showing up I was wondering if it was related to a unsatisfied dependancy or system requirement, even if I spotted the comment stating it was a C library issue. Now I know it should work properly. I have no idea how, but it should.

[@the_jazmin]

“Bottom bar” 🤭

[@L-in-oleum]

@@the_jazmin Seems like "FrontPanel" is its actual name. I stand corrected, if so. (But if you're alluding to a possible innuendo instead... yeah.)

[@dj_dexterdark_x942]

0:01 You have some true blood for installing Gentoo in these type of machines... Larry the cow is so proud from you.... oWo

[@sophie-144p7]

Just found this channel and this is great. All the other retro tech channels take themselves way too seriously so this is so much more enjoyable and fun! Appreciate the catboys ^-^

[@WindowsG]

omgg tysmm glad you enjoy them!~ ^w^

[@TradieTrev]

The audio reminds me when I used to bring in hugely compressed wma files on my school computer lab lol

[@WhateverBlasques]

What a pretty monitor, everything seems so readable!

[@qchtohere8636]

Flashbacks of me playing StarCraft using Wine Beta under Ubuntu 6.06 in a PentiumII 300MHz and 128MB of RAM back in 2006. And 32 bit processors were (and still are in most cases) very capable btw, I got an old 2005 Thinkpad with a mobile Core2Duo running Steam Streaming at 720p with a PS4 controller to work seamlessly back in 2016. Linux integrates beautifully to a set hardware as long as you know it's limits.

[@utkajmatke863]

c2d is 64 bit

[@qchtohere8636]

@@utkajmatke863 You're completely right, my bad. It was simply a CoreDuo. I always get that 2 in there out of habit.

[@Jackpkmn]

@@qchtohere8636 I don't blame you, Core Duo and Core Solo were such short lived cpus.

[@mercuriete]

For voodoo you need to compile a very old version of mesa and a very old version of the kernel. Don't expect to have support for old cards but... You could try a raiser to adapt PCI to pci-e and check if a modern GPU work. For the sound card, just install a PCI to USB adapter and just use a modern one xD. For graphical interface I remember that I could setup a remote xorg server but I don't know if is posible nowadays. But you always could redirect X with ssh -Y and then be sure you have indirect rendering enabled on mesa and you can use the remote computer to render games. I think playing neverball or xmoto is doable with ssh -Y

[@legofanlovessayori]

8kbps music, the sound of gravel i like it

[@dylantaylor490]

I grew up with a Pentium I 75 Mhz. Brings back memories haha

[@Vanska0]

Ran into this channel and i love it all!!!

[@Everything_and_Nothing_Tech]

This channel is art I love it

[@rylanclarkson3296]

It is a good day when either WGE or CRD uploads a new video.

[@stefannilsson2406]

1:38 Programs like firefox can take a couple of hours to compile even on modern hardware.

[@bernardev3]

Would Arch Linux work as well? I don't want to spend 10+ hours of my life waiting Gentoo to finish compiling.

[@fordprefect859]

I like NSCDE. It's ugly, but it's got a pretty powerful interface, and it's more lightweight than most i3 rices. The way it does virtual dektops is pretty nice too, although it does take some getting used to.

[@grosses_wassertier666]

It's not ugly. It's the most beatiful desktop environment around.

[@notNajimi]

It’s not ugly, it’s just classic!

[@amirulaiman8673]

"Hey smokers!" Hol up is that you Druaga1?

[@Sfner]

[3:38] "Historian is a furry" - mind sharing your fursona? OwO

[@XatxiFly]

This is a delightful piece of videowo

[@CaptainUltimaFTW]

truly a work of art :3

[@Yoda83x]

19:51 looks like a screenshot on the back of one of those distroboxes they sold in the 90s and early 00s

[@RedSntDK]

Love these Frankenstein videos, like a pentium 133MHz with a Voodoo3? lol. My first PC that I bought with my confirmation money back in either 96 or 97 was an AMD K6 200MHz and I believe it was a 3GB HDD which was massive at the time, a Matrox 4MB 2D card (not sure if it was 2 or 4 MB to be fair). Only a little while later did I get Voodoo 1, the one you needed to connect to your 2D card :) So to see a machine that is older than that running Voodoo3 just feels wrong. But it is very interesting to see what might've been possible in Linux at the time. Alas, I was on Windows 95 back then, coming from 3.11 and DOS as a kid, and only recently moved to Linux (January), but it's been a fun journey, and these videos are inspiring (and fun, very well edited).

[@tunichtgut5285]

Imagine, I wrote my thesis on a 486DX33 with 8MB RAM using Latex and Linux (kernel version 1.x) and had no issues. A P133 was already available but I didn't have the money for such a high-end machine. The institute had a computer room with some powerfull IBM RS/6000 workstations and 3270 terminals (if you wanted to work like in the 70th). I could have used that infrastructure, but I found it more convenient to work at home with my own slow PC than sitting in the noisy computer room in the basement without daylight. I had a very puristic fvwm2 setup with Xfree86 (not this fancy CDE/Motiv style Desktop you have). Today it is hard to imagine that you could work with such limited resources but it was possible. E.g. split your latex document in multiple files and process only the section you are currently working on, don't include images in draft version, don't start latex after each sentence / formula, ....

[@kingyachan]

I found myself saying "why would anyone ever do this" but then realised I had just sat captivated and watched the whole thing

[@ghost-jesus]

the reason the image keeps dragging the CPU down is because of your Voodoo GPU, that card offloads a lot of the 2d image processing to the CPU because it doesn't have hardware TCL, which means the CPU still has to calculate which items to render each frame really inefficiently, this behaviour persists with any card that has no hardware TCL even if you get a working driver, this wasn't a problem back in the day because the desktop environments were cleverly programmed to essentially "speedhack" the clipping process, something which hasn't been necessary for over 20 years.

[@Windy-]

You should try Gentoo on a PlayStation 2! Would be interesting to see what you could do with it.

[@WindowsG]

is that.. possible? >.>

[@Windy-]

@@WindowsG It is! You should be able to find out more about it online.

[@immoloism]

@@WindowsG Yeah it's possible, I built a liveusb a while back

[@AggressiveMenace]

@immoloism nice to see you here but honestly I'm not so surprised (specially because you tried Gentoo in almost every known 'misc' hardware).

[@asdprogram]

that energy⭐ boot screen is so nostalgic...

[@dylantaylor490]

I love the compiling it on something else bit haha that made me laugh out loud.

[@rmccombs66]

I never ran Linux on a Pentium 133. I re an it on a 486 DX/66 with no level 2 cache and then my next computer had a Pentium Ii 333. I think I ran Debian on the 486 and Debian and maybe later Slackware on to the Pentium Ii. I wonder if the latest Slackware would run on a Pentium II.

[@lordwiadro83]

Some weeks ago, I installed the newest Debian 12 on my Pentium II 333 PC. So yes, Slackware should be possible as well. Apparently, the installer needs at least 512 MB of memory, and my PC has 256 MB. I did the installation in a VirtualBox VM, and moved the system to the actual PC. After booting into text mode, it only uses 23 MB. My sound card, a Sound Blaster AWE64, was properly detected, and I played some MP3s on it. I still have many things to figure out, including running a GUI.

[@DeltaLima274]

this video is entertaining to watch! :D

[@JohnDoe-qk7wx]

Dude the druaga1 reference is golden, immediately subbed and would love to donate money.

[@WindowsG]

Aaa tysm! Glad you like itt

[@saidsoftly]

I wonder how it would run with classic cde on freebsd or something similar.

[@spark_thecat]

so it seams that is it trying to do some multitreading on a cpu that does not support multitreads :p still impressive it's able to run at all

[@Andre-vn1sb]

Windows95a was running fast on P133 with 32MB Ram, and Playing Midi, and watching Images - without any stottering - So you should better optimze your fvwm 🙂 But dont try this with Windows11 ^^ Btw: great projekt 🙂

[@danterobinson4611]

There is a distro that is also built from source and is lighter than Gentoo at under 100 packages. It is called KISS Linux, it is a little harder to install as the creator left the project and it's run by the community now and their instructions require you to use web archive and use their updated tarball (similar to Gentoo's stage 3) and repos. It's also a learning experience but is an interesting distro to try. It sadly only has support for 64 bit CPUs due to lack of support/popularity but there is an old fork called glasnost linux that hasn't been updated that supports i686 but since the repos are out of date it may not fetch the latest packages correctly and may even need patches to compile the programs properly so I don't know how well that will work out. Just another suggestion for you.

[@dahobi]

LoL! Had to laugh hard 😂 when you compiled the Kernel on another machine. Anybody who tried to compile a Kernel on such old hardware knows, it would take you literally....ages. My guess Kernel 6.0.0 would be something like one week on that Pentium thingy?! 🎉

[@cosmicusstardust3300]

I wonder how much better it could handle all of this if you were somehow able to overclock the Pentium 133

[@WindowsG]

I WANTED TO DO THATT but alas, the P133 is the very first intel microprocessor with a locked multiplier

[@cosmicusstardust3300]

@@WindowsG dang that sucks

[@Malheirods]

@@WindowsG then try to overclock by raising the FSB. What's your motherboard ?

[@ghost-jesus]

@@WindowsG you can overclock it, it's just not done the usual way, you can try to add the missing multiplier pin(s) back onto the CPU, mess with FSB speed (87 MHz works usually, 100 MHz works sometimes), or just try different settings until you map the working multipliers, in any case do not attempt to exceed 200 MHz, the CPU becomes highly unstable under load at 200 MHz and will likely overheat quickly without major cooling upgrades at that speed.

[@rmccombs66]

If you run out of memory the kernel will probably start killing processes.

[@joli22]

nice video! btw i also have a riva tnt 2, though I'm not sure which model exactly... it has 32mb vram

[@NathanDarkson984]

inb4 the usual "Just use puppylinux" comment appears

[@Vlad-1986]

you missed an opportunity to use links on graphics mode using framebuffer Also, you can use genlop to query how long a package needed to compile, or how long it has been compiling

[@WindowsG]

huh didnt know of genlop, thanks for the info!~ Also the Voodoo 3 2000 didnt have proper framebuffer support under gentoo (or at least i couldnt do it) so i couldnt really do that

[@Vlad-1986]

@@WindowsG True, realised later about the framebuffer. Sucks. I saw some solutions in the replies,. but not sure if it'll be worth it for you. If you use a framebuffer able linux terminal: fbi (image viewer). fbgs (pdf viewer). Enjoy!

[@nay6277]

that s on my list aswell. i got gentoo to run on a amd 686 notebook with wifi n cap. & fb support. it worx quite well. not sure if the P1 is worth all the hassel tho. maybe with using cross compilation... idk

[@dingo596]

For graphics you might want to get a cirrus logic card. They're not great but for support for them is everywhere.

[@RogerioPereiradaSilva77]

Either that or an an old Trident. X11 always had good support for those video cards back in the day.

[@pikaporeon]

I love how the desktop has an emotional support astolfo

[@pianokeyjoe]

LOL!! NOT DRUAGA 1 here!! LOL! I love this! 😛. Aahh Gentoo.. I know you could run Solaris x86 8 or 9 on this better but then again... do you want to? Redhat 6.2 just would have been better and much much easier. But hey, then it would not be a NOT DRUAGA 1 video! 😀

[@AStrutterZ]

Hey, just wondering, where did you get that Camel by Camel MIDI? I searched online but I can't seem to find an exact match

[@raymanovich3254]

Oh dang, I'm using the same monitor it seems

[@Vulto166]

You're a really funny guy! LoL Thank you!

[@cafesumeragi]

how did you change your terminal like that at 9:13?

[@francescomurru802]

Where i can find the Egyptian wallpaper?

[@legitimo1788]

I have an old PC here with an ATI x1200 on it, I've never managed to made the graphics work with new distros, so how an Voodoo is compatible?

[@LindenAshbyMK]

Great stuff 😅 I'd love to see some DOSBox action under some older Linux distro, like Mandriva, with 3D acceleration this time. I bet DOSBox needs something around Pentium 3 to run demanding titles, like Duke3D on Linux.

[@nickbooker5579]

Looking at the ~1 in the filenames on the floppy I guess they have long filenames. Assuming you compiled it into the kernel the vfat filesystem type would probably let you use the full filenames.

[@dj_dexterdark_x942]

7:09 Awoooooo, NIce Momiji Awoo, in old machine with Gentoo, and feh

[@YannBOYERDev]

I run Gentoo on my mini PC, with a Ryzen 7 7840HS 8C/16T 5.1GHz and 64GB of DDR5 RAM, it's so amazing CPUs are so fast nowadays you can make a fully working Gentoo system in less than a day, like, I installed my Gentoo testing + ffmpeg + sway + a lot of packages in like 2 hours... The only thing that took a really long time was Chromium compilation at 3 hours and 16 minutes of compile time but eh, Chromium is the biggest package to build on the Gentoo repository... Apart from Chromium every package is pretty fast to compile, and note my mini PC has a laptop CPU it would be a lot faster on high end desktop CPUs, CPU designers are genius.

[@illegalcoding]

You should have tried to compile the real CDE, it was open sourced at one point, there's a sourceforge page with a guide I've only really managed to get it working on OpenBSD but there is a Linux guide on there, too

[@Zer0sVoid]

Oh it's you! You've got multiple channels.

[@WindowsG]

Yep! Didn't think the bootup video would do well so it got relegated to the second channel.. boy was i wrong

[@Zer0sVoid]

@@WindowsG Extremely hahaha, be seeing you around

[@dakota48]

fun lazy tip for emerging packages in the future, you can just do -a for the shorthand of --ask.

[@dj_dexterdark_x942]

6:47 Astrolfo, NsCDE, Gentoo, good combination

[@kianseibel2236]

Why you didn't use distcc for compiling on another PC?

[@Skathacat0r]

I'm wondering if CDE would work faster and/or consume less memory.

[@ovi1326]

I wonder if compressing into opus rather than mp3 would work. Like you could probably fit bad apple in 30kbps opus and it would sound fine ish, the real question is would libopus work on ancient pentium

[@ovi1326]

nvm bad apple in 24kbps opus is glitchy as hell but the highs are there

[@fenixlolnope361]

God damn, that had to take a long ass time to compile.

[@avonfonds2567]

Very nice my Pentium II 400 Mhz handled a Minecraft server 1.0 with antix os however she need more ram 512 MB

[@dj_dexterdark_x942]

7:08 Awooo is here cute Momiji oWO

[@texmex6083]

gentoo on a windows surface go would be really funny

[@yashsingh6793]

Hey, new on gentoo and stuff. Can we compile and install gentoo on different disk and use it. Would it be still efficient enough?

[@WindowsG]

Yep!~ Thats how this install was created, nothing stops you from installing and compiling Gentoo for a different system and just carrying the HDD or an image over.

[@yashsingh6793]

@@WindowsG Thank you

[@oso2k]

But what are your CFLAGS? I see i486-gcc :facepalm:

[@DNFINST]

Voodoo 3- Is it a 3500 by chance?

[@Megatog615]

hmm i wonder if i could install gentoo on a 486DX2 @ 50MHz

[@WindowsG]

no reason why not!~ should be possible if you're ok waiting a few.. years

[@plainsabertooth7828]

I tried installing gentoo on my dual pentium 3 box and it can't find my wifi card.

[@koigoi]

21:30 TRANS RIGHTS

[@coffeedvdrw]

i love it!

[@Raphipod]

thought that video would be longer though xD

[@Vexisu]

You should overclock the CPU and see how it compiles xd

[@foamyadampower7105]

I NEED THIS COMPUTER

[@alexestefan7521]

how did you get it down to 32 MB ram?

[@posiputt1476]

I just built uwufetch with "-j12" on my machine. Took like a week.

[@koigoi]

WindowsG, if you're a woman it would be extremely cool and good. I know this might seem weird, but you have MASSIVE trans energy and it would be so cool to see another trans woman like myself in this space. If you're not, that's fine too! I just don't see any definitive evidence to disprove my theory. Despite you not having explicitly stated your identity. Anyway, lots of love, and I hope your channel grows from here!

[@WindowsG]

[@no-one3795]

Installing Linux like our forefathers used to be

[@julithething2154]

How did I just now find this

[@danielpicassomunoz2752]

How did you cross compile?

[@Silvie59]

Still loaded the photo faster thrn my windows 10 gaming machine lol

[@JamesSmith-ix5jd]

almost as slow as my main pc

[@fenixlolnope361]

Are you using mesa-amber branch?

[@RedSntDK]

Ohh, I wonder what tracker music would sound like on old hardware like this. It ought to run smoother than MP3, right? lol, htop taking ~15% CPU 😂

[@jody5661]

Needs more ecatboy

[@monochrome_linux]

its facinating how all femboys end up in Gentoo

[@illegalcoding]

this makes me wanna use gentoo

[@kuudereplus]

the moon to the michaelmjd sun ... so why is the moon so bright

[@nathantherandomguy1935]

Get an electric screwdriver because they are awesome and it makes things much easier.

[@dj_dexterdark_x942]

10:08 Arrgggg!!!... poor Moc

[@benikegaming]

i thought you actually compiled it on this lmao

[@WindowsG]

o h n o, that would've taken a month at least

[@benikegaming]

@@WindowsG would warm your room nicely though

[@uranixcz]

would it run if you reniced mocp?