Modern Linux on a 133MHz Pentium? Alpine on i586! (feat. NsCDE)

Today we have a look and see if a 133 Mhz Intel Pentium (A CPU from 1995) has what it takes to run Alpine Linux!~ With 256 MBs of RAM and a Voodoo 3 2000 I think it can run just fine, maybe it can even run a DE! Haha jkjk.. Unless?
Thanks For Viewing!~ ❤
Official Discord Server: / discord
~Credits
‪@DistrosProjects‬ For the idea (posting NTDEV's video) and repacking NsCDE for Alpine on i586.
‪@NTDEV‬ Creator of the video that basically inspired this one.
~References
NTDEV - Linux on a 16MHz 486SX • Linux on a 16MHz 486SX AT 2:02
marcdw1289 - Wonderful Desktop - NsCDE fvwmforums.org/t/wonderful-de... AT 29:22
DistroHopper39B - Installing Hannah Montana Linux on an Apple TV 1st Generation • Installing Hannah Mont... AT 29:45
~Music
Tony Thai - Windows 2000 Opening Theme
Nintendo DSi Shop Theme
Jogeir Liljedahl - “Addiction”
Sounds For The Supermarket 1 (1975) - Grocery Store Music
~Download Alpine Here!~
www.alpinelinux.org/
~PLoP Boot Manager
www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/do...
~NsCDE Desktop Environment
github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
~Computer Specs
Asus P5A-B
Intel Pentium SY022 @ 133Mhz
256 MBs SDRAM
3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 16MB
120 GB Western Digital IDE HDD
~Chapter Select
0:00 - Intro
2:45 - Bump
2:55 - Chapter 1 - Preperation
7:04 - Chapter 1 - First Boot
7:48 - Chapter 1 - Checking The HDD
8:44 - Chapter 1 - Plugging The Internet in
9:55 - Chapter 1 - Booting Alpine
12:02 - Chapter 1 - Network Issues
12:42 - Chapter 1 - Debugging The Network Issues
13:52 - Chapter 1 - Embracing Insanity
14:30 - Chapter 1 - Insanity Working Out
15:48 - Chapter 1 - Alpine Installation
18:56 - Chapter 1 - Alpine First Boot
19:51 - Chapter 1 - Neofetch Installation
21:16 - Chapter 1 - Neofetch
22:45 - Chapter 1 - htop
23:09 - Chapter 2 - Intro
23:29 - Chapter 2 - Recap
24:12 - Chapter 2 - DE Intro
27:33 - Chapter 2 - UwUFetch
28:40 - Chapter 2 - Taking It A Bit Further
28:59 - Chapter 2 - NsCDE Intro
29:53 - Chapter 2 - NsCDE Installation
34:19 - Chapter 2 - Fixing Dependencies
36:53 - Chapter 2 - Starting NsCDE
38:15 - Chapter 2 - NsCDE
43:16 - Outro
/////////////////////////////////
WindowsG Electronics: Season 2 Ep. 37
by SnoopiTek 2022
www.snoopieworld.net

[@bernardev3]

1:33 This CPU is some months older than Doom (1993) 💀

[@Psycheux_]

"I paid for the whole CPU I’m going to use the whole CPU" fuccin words to live by

[@joerad4722]

yet it shows 0% idle, because between user, system, and io -- he was using the whole CPU but didnt read top right.

[@diablo7806]

"We've even got a floating point unit! Fancy!" Those were the days lol

[@james73686]

I installed modern gentoo on a 66mhz 486 and 32 megs of ram without much issue. Was able to use the internet (with links) and everything. I couldn't run X11 but that was to be expected. Basically anything that didn't need X ran just fine.

[@rughksu]

How much did it take to compile? I bet 4+ months

[@james73686]

@@rughksu Lol I didn't compile it on that machine. All I did was use gentoo and told it to use a different root, and then started adding packages. Doing that worked pretty well. Doing things like using something other then the standard C library helped as well.

[@james73686]

@@rughksu Actually it was when I first got a 64 bit computer that it took a minute. I couldn't figure out how to set up a cross compiler, so I emulated a 64 bit computer on a 32 bit one. That took days....

[@james73686]

@Idiots In Cars I supose it could play the audio if I downloaded it and then decoded it into raw pcm.

[@ThePiprian]

Can you make a video showing that off? I wanna see that!

[@babyboomertwerkteam5662]

NsCDE is *NOT* based on "a desktop environment from the 90s" - it has nothing to do with the original CDE other than looking like it! It's a skin for FVWM.

[@WindowsG]

Yea.. at 37:12 i did correct myself on screen but not the audio, only while editing did i check the github again to check their wording, sorry about that heh.

[@L-in-oleum]

Okay that xterm icon live-update is really cool :O Seems like NsCDE only got partially installed, though; there should be a bottom tasktray-like app launcher.

[@DistrosProjects]

Yeah, the NsCDE panel doesn't work on Alpine due to it using a different C library that causes certain things to break. I tried to get the panel working with no luck.

[@TheArcaneBrony]

@@DistrosProjects you could have added the glibc package since its available on apk

[@liquid2499]

So cool!! The first computer i had that was mine alone was a p133 with 64mb of ram and i was absolutely enamored with it at the time. It felt so powerful and limitless (64mb! That’s so much ram!) compared to anything i had used before. Thanks for making videos they’re really fun!

[@joli22]

Hi, this is the first time I watched a video from you, and I really liked it! Looking forward to more weird retro pc stuff!

[@WindowsG]

Glad you liked it!!~ ^-^

[@paragm12]

Thanks for making this video! It brought back memories of my first assembled-PC from 1999 - a Pentium Celeron 400-something MHz running Win95 with, oh gosh, perhaps 4MB(?) of RAM and a SiS 6xx graphics card. I was mostly playing "NFS Porsche Unleashed" on it. A few years later, when I was in university, I discovered Linux and I went down the rabbit-hole of running mutiple flavors of Linux - building and compiling packages (before package managers were reliable) as well as kernels to extract the most optimal performance on the Celeron. Started with Mandriva, then added Suse, Fedora, finally ending up on Gentoo. Something about taking 3 long days to get the system up was exciting!

[@AlejandroRodolfoMendez]

Wow this was a adventure. Great video.

[@BilalHeuser1]

The first computer I tried running Linux on was an AMD 386DX-40. I used a set of CD-ROMs from Infomagic and believe the Kernel version was 1.0.59. In addition, I recompiled the kernel as well.

[@JARRINATOR]

Your PC survived, I burned mine jaja, my Pentium 3 still rocks, My Pentium 1 was like a PSX, the Tomb Raider games, Rayman, Resident Evil, Quake, what a beautiful machine. Greetings from Ecuador

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

Modern linux will likely drop support for this architecture pretty soon. There was discussion about this on the linux kernel mailing list and Linus Torvalds suggested dropping it. And yea... Samba is a cpu hog.... it's insane. Even on a modern cpu it can bring a system down to its knees if there are enough users. I'd highly recommend using NFS for stuff like this.

[@dcfuksurmom]

They discussed 486 but I've not seen anything about 586/Pentium.

[@ruadeil_zabelin]

eventually it was 486 only yes. Though plenty of userspaces are dropping 32bit as a whole which might mean it's being barely tested. Freebsd still actively supports it though, and really well too.

[@Wint3rshad3]

That button press followed by the post sound took me to a happy place :)

[@timrattenbury4768]

4:14 "not saying it NOT SAYING IT" lmao

[@UNSCPILOT]

Pretty fun video, been starting to collect parts to build a AMD "Socket A" system with, found a asus motherboard, a Athlon XP 2800+, BFG TECH geforce 6800 gt oc and a couple other bits and Bobs. Just trying to decide if I should get a new case or try to reuse and old one

[@WindowsG]

Yooooo nice!!~ My first computer was a Socket A based system, had an Athlon XP 2400+ and ASUS 6800 GT. Sadly the elitegroup motherboard decided to die awhile back. Was epic when I used it tho :3

[@wiredmind]

I love the editing on this aha My notifs don't work even though they're enabled so I keep missing things, good old YT fills the hole left by druaga's increasingly uncommon videos so thank you lol -tesco (i wonder if you remember me 🤔)

[@WindowsG]

akifhgakfg how did i miss thisss, tysmm!~ ^-^

[@wiredmind]

@@WindowsG awweee, ur welcome!!

[@michy2357]

first time i see a video of yours, really liked this video!! you remember me of druaga1

[@keylowmike85]

thumbs up for mentioning Druaga runtimes and putting modern Linux on potatoes. This is the content that I like.

[@quilak]

This was such a fun video to watch, thank you dude :D Didn‘t expect it to run as well as it actually did :o

[@raineyjayy]

I stumbled on this video because of a mix of looking into Socket 8 info for a retro build and my general interest in Linux. Staying because you make me laugh.

[@garyjenkins7861]

Awwww, The good old days when our computers made amazing beeps and boops, grinding hard drives, dial-up. Neeeeed MOREEEEEEE.

[@tymofii.lytvynenko]

I recommend AntiX Linux for old PC. Hello from Ukraine!

[@vladlvv]

But nothing beats gentoo, compiling all os for that thing specifically is best idea, u can utilize all hardware resources and even with decent gpu, probably run some games. Доречі однофамілець останнє що я тут очікував)

[@ryanics2291]

I came for the video on linux on retro hardware. I stayed for the anime vibe, and the many, MANY sexual induendos.... or has he put it, "My body keeps making sticky stuff to respond to a sickness I dont have any more, but you know, not the hot kind, the kind that makes talking correctly kind of hard..." Awesome video :D

[@stevenchristenson2428]

WIFI worked there because the actual radio waves are pretty small and there is enough of a tail there to act as a receiver. Your router or AP is likely pretty close to your PC ( in the house is close ) so it would work fine. The RPI Zero has the antenna built right on to the PCB and its probably shorter then the little nub sticking out of your aircard there.

[@tunnandaaung2]

U got new sub n i got new channels to watch

[@oefzdegoeggl]

Did the first Linux install in 1998 on a 486 DX4-100 with SuSE 6.0, kernel 2.0.36. That felt a lot faster than what you're doing there. Most likely because I did use a VGA 16-color driver running 640x480. Setting up X was a huge pain in the ass back then though. This actually managed to run KDE 1.xx pretty good.

[@foobar2653]

WiFi is actually fairly CPU intense with any adapter that is from that era. I actually ran a box this old as an access point and a sperate one as a router, two machines because I was a little worried about overloading one even with crappy DSL speeds. The router one sat in the corner booting off a floppy for over a decade.

[@DouglasWalrath]

host keys are required even without key auth on ssh, it basically tells the ssh client "hey i am who i say i am"

[@WindowsG]

Ah, that explains it. thanks!~

[@DouglasWalrath]

@@WindowsG yep, basically on first connect to a new server the ssh client asks to store the host public key, then each time you connect after that it uses the stored public key to make sure the server is the same one you connected to before, to avoid someone man-in-the-middling your connection

[@Amigafur]

I have that exact same case! Going to put an A80501-66 in it and run DOS 7.1.

[@Malheirods]

I had no clue NsCDE would run on this. Some of the dependencies are supposed to need SSE2. Will try with Alpine distro then ! I have a Kyro II, do you know if it has appropriate non SSE2 drivers ? I'll have SSE.

[@kreuner11]

When there's no vim, there's vi

[@pabloqp7929]

Hell yeah!!

[@JessicaFEREM]

10:34 plop always gave me a "hacked original xbox dashboard" vibe to it i fuc wit it

[@VauxhaIIOpel]

this is a really random question but in the beginning of the video, the floppy drive like seeks back and forth 3 times after the initial seektest; is that a Win2000 thing, the chipset on your board, or a setting you can toggle? i need this for. reasons (funny wooboo-wooboo-wooboo sound make brain go brrr)

[@VauxhaIIOpel]

and yes i am rewatching old snoopie videos, they're great

[@MR-vj8dn]

I use old computers from time to time, but I don’t react or sound the way you do. I hope you had a great time.

[@photoniccannon2117]

Thanks to you, I will now be able to build the perfect 1MB/sec file transferring PC 😂

[@dj_dexterdark_x942]

15:45 Good wifi network adaptor, good boy xD

[@RHTORAS]

a similar distro (init is the main difeerence) is Adelie linux that works like a charm in machines like this... try it...

[@JanuszKrysztofiak]

Memories, my first Linux box was actually a P133 with 16MB of RAM, it was 1997 or 1998. This were much less user-friendly back then, especially configuring XFree86 (yes, that was before autoconfiguration) when you had a cheap graphics card from a generic manufacturer. As others have noted, NsCDE has nothing in common with actual CDE/Motif other than recreating the layout of CDE desktop environment on top of FVWM window manager and providing themes for modern toolkits (Qt, GTK+) to mimic the looks of Motif. It is to mimic the 1990s vibe of CDE desktop and Motif toolkit on modern systems. No surprise the experience is sluggish. Even lightweight distros assume something more potent than a single-core Pentium 133 MHz (there were no multicore x86 CPUs then, at best you could get a mainboard with slots for more than 1 CPU; non-NT Windowses were not able to use it anyway). Pentium didn't even had SIMD instructions.

[@j00500hall]

PLOP- the heavenly saviour of resurrecting old tech, hallowed be thy name.

[@elisa_5445]

0:16 i always thought this award logo was a person, now i noticed it is a blue ribbon

[@LiveBlueSky]

It wouldn't be better off if you tried to install tinycore instead of that?

[@chrll]

16:42 But you selected to install an openssh server (you could have selected "none"). Creating host keys is part of the installation of openssh. You cannot have an ssh server without host keys, they are not optional.

[@user1iun4aks88]

It's really amazing and cool! Linux is the best!!! By the way, how did you download the image for i586? I can't find it anywhere :((

[@WindowsG]

This was done with the "x86" Standard installer, is should still support i586 or at least it did when i tried it

[@user1iun4aks88]

@@WindowsG wow, thanks

[@user1iun4aks88]

@@WindowsG Did you use standard or extended?

[@WindowsG]

@@user1iun4aks88 i used standard but either shouldd work

[@ThatStella7922]

nice

[@milasudril]

So compile the mesa driver with sse2 disabled? It does not make sense to require sse2 for a voodoo driver.

[@jimjamz.]

Runs Half-Life @ 2 fps, and doesn't even run Quake, on a P133!?!? Absolute horseshit. You do realise no-one was using 1920x1080 in 1997? Us plebs had to settle for 400x300 and 512x384 before we got our Voodoo2s. Love your videos by the way.

[@roastsmoked]

19:53 You were looking for _doas_ (openbsd sudo replacement) and _vi_ instead of vim😀

[@roastsmoked]

I've actually never seen vim launched through the command vim (instead of vi). Not that I recall.

[@thegoodwoof]

Miguel approves your video "0w0"

[@theredytper]

There is a command in Alpine called “doas”, which is similar to sudo, and acts the same.

[@fabricio4794]

the best part is that this channel is called windowsG and run LInux...

[@tokoshiro5]

feels old, man I found my old pentium mmx 233mhz with 32mb ram which I used to rock a slackware 7.1...I think I need to find a AT psu around

[@dw_2005]

How dare you steal an apple TV screenshot 29:41 from the 8 Bit-Guy. I can see the lawyers coming to knock on your door with a cease and desist! (Just joking, Davids a good sport and im sure he's fine with it. But just in case.......Better Call Saul!)

[@silviurec8550]

ok web browsing on that thing will make the cou go boom

[@kungfujesus06]

You could have compiled the original cde, the code is open now. I've done it on a g3 before.

[@TheRealWalkers]

great video, was fun to watch while drunk 🤣

[@hideousrob]

the pentium power house :P

[@julithething2154]

Bruh, the first modern case is literally my case.

[@spark_thecat]

Nya :3

[@breadworkshop]

I have never seen someone use a capital letter in their username like that. Thanks

[@eduardmart1237]

What about something like puppy Linux?

[@lorensims4846]

Linux is ideal for old computers! Unfortunately, many distros are ending support for 32-bit processors. I'm running Slackware -current on a 2006 OG white polycarbonate MacBook with a 32-bit-only intel CoreDuo "Yonah" CPU. Slackware will still give you a complete, fully up-to-date Linux on something as old as a 386! If you need to run on a 64-bit processor you'll need Slackware64. From the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s I rocked an ASUS EeePC 2G Surf running Slackware -current as my main machine (until the keyboard finally flaked out). Linux in my jacket pocket! The EeePC had a Celeron of some sort, with 256M of RAM and 2G of storage. I added a 16GB SD card for my install and I was all fine (KDE wouldn't load and going to Facebook would instantly crash the system so I just didn't do that). I'm running Alpine Linux on my iPhone! Stay furry!

[@chenyansong]

Slackware lacks of package dependency management such that latest Slackware now requires you to install everything, not really lightweight for old pc.

[@lorensims4846]

⁠@@chenyansong A “full install,” which is recommended, includes most of what most people need. If do-it-yourself is NOT your thing, it still doesn’t mean it’s not just fine for outdated hardware. As I said, I ran Slackware -current on a 256M RAM EeePC for a decade, just fine.

[@chenyansong]

@@lorensims4846 when I was using Slackware back to 90’s and early 00’s I was able to hand picked packages I would like to install and I knew exactly why each package is need and what it is needed for. Not any more so I switch to Debian based distribution

[@lorensims4846]

@@chenyansong Slackware does NOT "require" you to install everything, only recommends it. It's easy to install a reduced installation that is still just as stable as a full install would be.

[@BlizzardfurYT]

as somone also in the midwest yes cicada does make more cicada

[@WizardNumberNext]

Alpine is ridiculous Mesa with enforced SSE2 on i586? The soonest SSE2 for introduced is Intel Pentium 4 Willamette That is just 3 years to AMD64 No i586 would even be able accommodate SSE2 as it needs very wide architecture (16byte/128bit registers). This would be challenging for i586 to say least

[@themixerhun1070]

iPod always watching

[@mikephillips5551]

Now try gnome 43 or plasma 5.26 on it !!

[@zarkdek]

Xd

[@windowsagent981]

As a furry I felt even more compelled to watch this master owo

[@kreuner11]

Why are you censoring a local ipv6?

[@DistrosProjects]

Thanks for the shoutout!

[@diabz]

It's interesting seeing someone young have this experience from the 90s in current day.

[@gnuemacs1166]

I used to run xserver and eMacs

[@Megatog615]

Did this stop working? I tried Alpine on my Pentium MMX machine and it just dies with "illegal instruction." Did they get rid of i586?

[@Megatog615]

UPDATE I looked into this further, on a Pentium III machine and with verbose boot messages enabled and other hacks to get it booting, it absolutely isn't supported anymore. At some point they must have dropped even Pentium III 686 support because an essential library, libblkid.so.1.x throws an invalid opcode error which is technical for THIS PROGRAM TRIED TO USE AN INSTRUCTION THAT IS NOT AVAILABLE ON THIS CPU. A shame, really. What do we have left? Gentoo? Is it just Gentoo now?

[@Megatog615]

ANOTHER UPDATE it looks like you can still use Alpine 3.16, but you may have to roll your own USB image(I formatted the whole USB flash drive as fat32 without partitioning, copied the contents of the iso into it, and ran syslinux --directory /boot/syslinux/ --install /dev/sda, then mounted it again and adjusted the kernel command line parameters. I disabled acpi by using acpi=off).

[@tomatobros]

I'm just watching this incase for a post apocalyptic disaster situation, god knows what computer you can get in dumbster.

[@ezekielaesland1254]

que buen momichi jaj laik

[@thebluegremlin]

omg it;s a druaga1 !

[@illegalcoding]

"its ok if the capacitors dont touch" LMAOOO

[@Maxtraxv3]

should of tryed iceWM

[@marballesta8496]

Run doom?

[@alexdhall]

3:37: Yep that's what a AT tower is. Big heavy three sided metal cover. 😹 Watching you flail through working on this is cringe...😬

[@Jarmundx]

Okay wtf this is some hacky linux wizardry shit xD

[@coolduder1001]

Pa or Mi?

[@coffeetarded]

i love u

[@the2323guy]

hi raymoo

[@coffeetarded]

@@the2323guy helo Quickskeleton gib me money now yes

[@the2323guy]

@@coffeetarded im broke today but ill donate tomorrow

[@JessicaFEREM]

this gives me fediverse vibes like intense fediverse smell

[@Motolav]

Alpine switched to Doas from Sudo so thats why sudo didn't work and wasn't installed

[@jecobmezing5017]

Try to use dsl

[@fabioec5]

Now toss a KolibriOS into it!

[@EthanSeville]

OwO

[@someoneyoudonotknow]

18:18 "[Cis] it is, I like [cis]" hmmmmmmmmmm ;p

[@gnuemacs1166]

With an s3 video card they had less cpu usage than modern computers

[@eadweard.]

Pardon?

[@gnuemacs1166]

@@eadweard. with an s3 chip u get graphics acceleration with 0 cpu usage

[@Knirin]

@@gnuemacs1166Unfortunately nearly all of the modern software has decided to forgo hardware acceleration for features.

[@szyszka8303]

it works even on mobile phones, so ...

[@nick-leffler]

Thats a weird looking sata cable.

[@zuur303]

FDIKS

[@Maxtraxv3]

windows 98 boot floppy disk would of done this faster, thats not joke.

[@kantraa]

mmmm i love slot flavored cpus 🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤 i love the internal bleeding 🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤

[@kantraa]

also, i really wanna hear the backstory of the 2nd pci network adapter lol

[@WindowsG]

​@@kantraa *sigh* Back a few years ago when i was first getting hands-on with vintage computers i got one with that NETGEAR network card. After installing it in a PowerEdge 1300 Pentium II based server (after removing the bracket because it was bent, and 12 year old me didn't know how to use pliers) i powered it on and added the drivers and connected to my home network. While yes initially the card did work it made the entire network extremely slow (at least, to 12 year old me, i doubt anything was really wrong) so i stopped using it, shoved it in a box and haven't used it till this video... and it proceeded to get really hot and make the computer not POST, guess its cursed. aaand yea i said all that and decided to speed it up because it was like 5 minutes long >-< also yesss internal bleeding my favorite!~

[@Bedfford]

Druaga1 clone?

[@PearComputingDevices]

Kitty litter not included.

[@WindowsG]

sads

[@JarppaGuru]

no! you install 1995 linux on modern pc. ITS FAST

[@DouglasWalrath]

networkn't

[@sylv512]

have you tried using clickbait to get more views?