Oldest kernel for Pentium-III

[Vagulo]

Can you please tell whether there is somewhere the compiled old kernel, nearly 2.6.27, so to establish a Mageia on pentium-III?
With the new kernel in the different distributions are slow/heavily on older hardware, even when using lightweight DE/WM.

[doktor5000]

The oldest kernel for Mageia 1 and the one with no patches (also often referred to as a vanilla or plain-jane kernel)
would be kernel-linus-2.6.38.7-1.mga. If you really need an older kernel, you could try to install one from Mandriva 2010.1
but the oldest one they have is only 2.6.34. The other option would be to compile one from source, which is not
that difficult, and you could freely choose the version ...

Also, could you please explain what do you mean exactly when you say the kernel is slow/heavy on older hardware?

[Vagulo]

Thank you.

I've never tried compiling the kernel. It seems to me quite difficult. But if there is no ready-made, compiled, I can only try it yourself.

I think, with the increase in kernel number support for obsolete equipment is becoming worse. I installed on the computer distribution with kernel 2.6.27. He worked quickly. When you install the distributions with new kernel significantly slow start, open and work programs.

[zugunder]

Why don't you use the "special" lightweight distributions for such old hardware? AFAIK they do include relatively new kernels, though maybe stripped from some functions, but tuned for the CPUs as old as P-II.
http://maketecheasier.com/best-lightwei ... 2012/02/17

[Vagulo]

That distribution, which I installed with kernel 2.6.27 - it was the Russian version of Puppy. This is fast. But the software is very outdated...
I need to try the Russian version of Puppy with new kernels. Thank you.

[zugunder]

You may want to try Puppy Racy distribution - I have it on my old 128MB thumb drive, kernel 3.0.7.
Not sure how it behaves on P-III machine, but since it is from the Puppy family and pretty small, should be OK.
One more thing you may try is Slax, but it is somewhat different - check out the description on their website.

P.S. And, of course, you need to take a look at Knoppix and Bodhi Linux.

[doktor5000]

If you want something really small, you might want to take a look at http://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/welcome.html or http://www.slitaz.org/en/

[Vagulo]

On the computer have enough RAM 1.25 GB. There's even possible to run KDE4. But the start the system, programs, and their work is slow.
Now I think that the modern program will not be able to work quickly on older сomputers. A kernel build is not so important.

[doktor5000]

Well, then use other programs which don't need that much resources. You can try maybe Openbox as window manager,
if LXDE or XFCE is still too heavy.

[zugunder]

Well, I do not think it is a problem of the kernel (only).
If you take a look at the minimal hardware requirements of, say, Bodhi Linux, it says:
300mhz i386 Processor
128megs of RAM
1.5g HD space
and it is not dramatically different for Knoppix or Puppy...
It doesn't seem that they use an outdated kernel... So probably there is some hardware incompatibility issue that you have with that Puppy distro you mentioned. You can check if CPU load is really high when you run programs, if it is not - check if your IDE configuration is OK.
BTW, what kind P-III do you have? Is it the first 450MHz chip or Tualaitin >1GHz?

[Vagulo]

Oh! I apologize, but this computer is not a Pentium-III, its have processor Pentium-IV 1.7 GHz.

Thank you for your answers! While I was stopped experiments on this computer. Later, in his spare time, perhaps, I will continue to seek a balance between speed and quality of programs on older hardware.

[zugunder]

By any chance, isn't it a Willamette on Intel chipset with RDRAM?

[doktor5000]

Oh! I apologize, but this computer is not a Pentium-III, its have processor Pentium-IV 1.7 GHz.

That's not really what i would call a slow processor, and it should be fine with current kernels.