Ancient hardware Support - wb8tyw/D-Rats GitHub Wiki

Most of my x86 systems are hand-me-downs.

I am running Anti-X Linux 21 (Debian Bullseye) on a Dell Inspiron 1521. Anti-X linux is the only Linux that the display, and especially using the second display worked.

I just upgraded it from Anti-X Linux 19 (Debian Buster).

After I upgraded it, I discovered that it is recommended to backup user files, keep track of what extra you have installed/configured and to install a new distribution and then restore your home directory and previous configuration.

I try to keep an "as built" log for all my systems, and I am trying to move to using Ansible to keep them properly configured, but that is going slower than I would like. Using Ansible means that instead of making configuration changes locally, I make on the a system designated as the Ansible node, and then run a playbook to make the change. This is very easy to do with Linux. My system for Ansible support is running mirrored disks for higher availability.

I also have a 32 bit system and a 64 bit system for doing testing on, and again Anti-X 32 bit and 64 bit is the only operating system that would work.

It will look a lot like Ubuntu from the command line, and there are different UI options available.

The downside is that support is only through a user forum, and if google has not already found an answer for a question, you may be on your own.

I have not yet got support for "sleep/suspend" mode to work, and by default swapiness was set to 10 (hardly swap).

There is a persistent myth that setting swapiness or equivalent to a low value is best for low memory systems. That works as long as you never need to swap. As soon as you need to swap, a low swapiness will make your system hang for a while as it has to both swap out and swap in. Most systems I have managed with low memory work best with higher swapiness values.

The other issue I have with anit-x that I have to pretty much leave the wifi off while I am connected to the wired network. I have a br0 device on the eth0 device to allow VMs, and something is broken in that if the wifi is on and gets a dhcp address, it disables dhcp assigned address on the wired interface, and all my network access stops. The network management GUI seems to be confused about the br0 device existing.

On the laptop I also get crashes if I have too many browser windows open too long, or have visual studio code up for too long. Restarting both of these periodically has greatly improved up time.