We're sorry but this page doesn't work properly without JavaScript enabled. Please enable it to continue.
Feedback

AOSC OS/Retro - An Introduction

Formal Metadata

Title
AOSC OS/Retro - An Introduction
Subtitle
An Ongoing Quest for the Possibility of Modern Linux on Vintage Hardware
Title of Series
Number of Parts
287
Author
License
CC Attribution 2.0 Belgium:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
Identifiers
Publisher
Release Date
Language

Content Metadata

Subject Area
Genre
Abstract
In this presentation, I will share our community's ongoing exploration of running modern and "standard" Linux distributions on vintage hardware - AOSC OS/Retro. AOSC OS/Retro, as an official branch of AOSC OS (the modern-device-facing mainline), runs a generally similar feature set - systemd, Glibc/Binutils/GCC/Coreutils/Util-Linux, X.org/Mesa, etc. and shares the same source tree with the latter. With over a year of spending our spare time on the project, tweaking features, designing a desktop experience, and optimising compiler flags, we have a usable distribution that could run on systems as slow as a 486SX, and as fast as "modern" Core Duo systems. We also have an active effort to port AOSC OS/Retro across multiple architectures, with the tally currently standing at eight architectures - and counting (alpha, armv4, armv6hf, armv7hf, i486, loongson2f, powerpc, ppc64). We still have a long list of issues to solve, such as login delays and throttled I/O on ISA-based systems. I hope to gather feedback and criticism through this presentation. - What is AOSC OS (self introduction)? - What is AOSC OS/Retro (and how it differs from AOSC OS)? - Design Goals and Self-Afflicted Agonies - Application Stack and Software Selection - End Results (so far) - Thoughts, Reflections, and Questions - Q&A