Lowarch

The short description is on the front page. This is the long one:

How often does it happen to you, that some friend comes to you and says that she's got this old computer, and it doesn't work anymore? It's just slow and she wants to throw it away. It happens to me, oh, at least once every year.

Or, maybe you actually own shuch a worthy and ancient piece of "once a technical miracle" yourself? Isn't it sad if it shall not be permitted to live, just because newer technology has been built on its merits? Yes, I say. And if you're anything like me, you too, whenever you stumble upon such antiquties, are cribling to see if Linux is as good on old computers as they say it is.

You might even have tried it. I have. I have tried a lot of distributions in fact, and some of them, espessialy once that are aimed at low-end systems, works very well. But there's alway something that has bothered me; That it's not Arch Linux. They install a nice system, and that's it. Very few choises.

I have been a devoted Arch Linux user since 2003 (ok, 31st of December), and now I feel a bit uneasy whenever I use other distributions, mostly by all the hands-holding, at the same time as keeping me uninformed of what's actually happening. But Arch Linux doesn't work on anything older than i686 processors, that's Pentium Pro and better, Pentuim MMX doesn't work, I can tell you. I have tried; a lot of illegal instructions.

Now, again, a friend of mine came home with a nice Thinkpad the company she works for had put in the garbage. And I immediatly said, it would be fun to put Linux on it, and see what it can do. And again I tried all the different flavours, and once more ended up with thinking: Arch Linux would have been perfect on this machine. I could have chosen exactly the packages that are suited for it, and it would have worked great. And this time, different other times, I was relentless. I thought why not?

So I made Lowarch, a distribution based on Arch Linux, but compiled to work with anything with a i486 processors or newer. Why not i386, you may ask. And I answer you, yet you may not understand. It's because newer versions of glibc no longer have support for linuxthreads, but use NPTL instead. i386 just doesn't have the properties needed to use NPTL.

Lowarch is not a port of Arch Linux. That means, it is based on Arch Linux and in most respects it's quite similar, but in some ways differs. The most notable difference is the package selection. It is, or will be when I've done the selecting right, made to fit old computers. So there's no gnome or kde, but xfce4 and fluxbox.
The other most obvious differenc is that Lowarch so far is maintained by just me, not a big team of developers. Updates will be much slower, and I will keep the number of packages as low as possible, to give me a chance of keeping up with updates. The current selection is also quite arbitrary, so don't get upset when I suddenly decide to delete a lot of the packages.
Then I also have some ideas for changes that I might introduce at a later stage, when the whole system has started to stabilise.

So, now you can climb up into attics and down to dark cellars and clean the dust from your old almost forgotten hardware, and make them run a new, up to date and modern operating system. But remember: Don't expect everything to work yet, although everything I've tried has worked for me. It needs testing, and that's something you can do. Tell me if something is broken. This is even possible to do on a new and shining i686 or x86_64 machine.