What kinds of modern parts and freeware/abandonware are reasonable for legacy windows?

Vimmer

Vimmer

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Sorry if the question is kinda vague and wordy: I couldn't really put it another way.

I recently decided I am going to switch over entirely to Debian shortly, because it will be a great learning experience, and there is a whole forum dedicated to plain old Debian. I personally think whether the CD version or DVD version is best is entirely based on what works. For example, I could ultimately only get Debian to properly install on my laptop by using the DVD version because the CD version did not have the proper firmware, and fallowing their instructions for installing the firmware during the install process the best I could did not pan out.

However, I also think the idea of installing legacy windows OSes (anything before 10, really, that's when they started bloating the crap out of it) on a desktop computer is exciting: people use windows 7 for abandonware, the only thing you need to watch out for it connecting to the internet: based on what i've read, the old versions of windows are very vulnerable to firewall hacks.

Just looking for information related to everything in this post. Have any of you experimented with outdated windows operating systems a whole lot? What kinds of parts are most likely to accommodate windows 7? That would be neat if there was some sort of artificial intelligence that could read operating systems on a drive and make recommendations like that, not that it would be very accurate, LOL.
 


Vimmer said:
whether the CD version or DVD version
Click to expand...
The main difference is the size of the ISO, up to about 10 years ago you could fit a full 64bit Linux ISO on a CD, now most will only fit on a DVD or USB, and it would be identical for both USB and DVD
 
Brickwizard said:
The main difference is the size of the ISO, up to about 10 years ago you could fit a full 64bit Linux ISO on a CD, now most will only fit on a DVD or USB, and it would be identical for both USB and DVD
Click to expand...
yes i know: that's why i was confused after i figured that out, is you would think the name of it would would reflect on specifically what's inside the iso. The debian developers purposely leave out a ton of stuff a generic user would want in an operating system, but unfortunately, i'm finding that ubuntu systems are causing me a lot of problems that the debian systems aren't: and i don't know why. Over the past couple of years, i have relied on ubuntu itself to do generic computing and am now finding the bugs are making it inoperable.
 
How old is the machine you are using? This one is 2010 vintage laptop with 4gb ram, I have several drives for it, all work without problems, but my main 2 are Mint LMDE, and Parrot home, but it runs equally well with MX-Linux, Peppermint, Debian with driver pack.and Mint 21
 
Vimmer said:
I personally think whether the CD version or DVD version is best is entirely based on what works. For example, I could ultimately only get Debian to properly install on my laptop by using the DVD version because the CD version did not have the proper firmware
Click to expand...
Make sure you install generic initramfs and upgradable kernel (the one without version number), and if this doesn't work there are contrib and non-free firmware components that might fix the problem.

Vimmer said:
Have any of you experimented with outdated windows operating systems a whole lot? What kinds of parts are most likely to accommodate windows 7?
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I still have original ISO's starting from Win7 toward Win11 but problem with older ones isn't so much about hardware but with drivers.
There are no reliable sources to download drivers except in the wild which is not wise to use.
Manufacturers no longer offer old drivers for download.
 
Vimmer said:
The debian developers purposely leave out a ton of stuff a generic user would want in an operating system, but unfortunately, i'm finding that ubuntu systems are causing me a lot of problems that the debian systems aren't: and i don't know why.
Click to expand...
Anybody who knows anything about Canonical's 'vision' can answer you this. Quite simply, when Debian build stuff, they build it properly the first time around.......and then they LEAVE IT ALONE. Shuttleworth's boys & girls just cannot resist p**sing around, farting-about and endlessly 'tweaking' and re-building stuff.

This is why Ubuntu could never really be considered 'stable'.....unless you stick to to the 5yr-support LTS releases (and ONLY those).

And after my own experiences with Ubuntu in my early days with Linux - like tweaking and customizing their kernels to better fit with Mark's 'vision' of where he thinks Ubuntu SHOULD be heading.....and dropping support for hardware left, right & centre, often completely without warning - well; you'll never catch ME using it again.


Mike. o_O
 
MikeWalsh said:
Anybody who knows anything about Canonical's 'vision' can answer you this. Quite simply, when Debian build stuff, they build it properly the first time around.......and then they LEAVE IT ALONE. Shuttleworth's boys & girls just cannot resist p**sing around, farting-about and endlessly 'tweaking' and re-building stuff.

This is why Ubuntu could never really be considered 'stable'.....unless you stick to to the 5yr-support LTS releases (and ONLY those).

And after my own experiences with Ubuntu in my early days with Linux - like tweaking and customizing their kernels to better fit with Mark's 'vision' of where he thinks Ubuntu SHOULD be heading.....and dropping support for hardware left, right & centre, often completely without warning - well; you'll never catch ME using it again.


Mike. o_O
Click to expand...
Yeah canonical has made some odd choices over the past 7 or so years. The thing that's strange to me though, is these computers i'm referring to were purchased within the last 4 years, so i really shouldn't be effected by the fact that they decided to drop older hardware. Up until the past several months, Ubuntu has been pretty bugless and has worked just fine. I've been playing around a lot with formatting the debian versions and ubuntu on my laptop, and ubuntu produced it's first fatal system crash for me after a week of having installed it.

As far as shuttleworth seems concerned, people who have lives like this are always kinda suspicious to me:

In 1995, Shuttleworth founded Thawte Consulting, a company which specialized in digital certificates and Internet security. In December 1999, Shuttleworth sold Thawte to VeriSign
Click to expand...

that sounds so boring and unnecessary! Not the sale, but companies that specialize in digital certification.
Oh well, there are plenty of the elan musk types, not all of them are as lame as elan musk. I'm grateful that there are compromises between pure linux operating systems and proprietary ones (such as ubuntu).
 
update: i just wrote the wrong debian net installer to my flash drive, i still had versions 11 and versions 12.5, that firmware garbage didn't happen this time.

DOH!

I honestly wish i had the time to mess with all of the major linux distributions, but you need to give each one a long test drive (i'd say at least a year), given the initial phases of using it doesn't hurt you,before you can be sure how you feel about it.
 
Vimmer said:
update: i just wrote the wrong debian net installer to my flash drive, i still had versions 11 and versions 12.5, that firmware garbage didn't happen this time.
Click to expand...
Which 'debian net installer' did you write to your flash drive ? ......and did you download that from somewhere ??
 
Hi Vimmer

I have 8 partitions with various linux flavors and jump back and forth all the time.

A year is a long time for just one.

Vektor
 
Vektor said:
Hi Vimmer

I have 8 partitions with various linux flavors and jump back and forth all the time.

A year is a long time for just one.

Vektor
Click to expand...
I just don't understand the big difference between using firefox in mint or arch. However, if you use 10-20 different programs in each one over a year, then you can get a clear picture of each one.

Ive also personally found that the destop environment makes just as big of a difference as the distro.
 
@Vimmer :-

Don't forget; drivers are kernel-specific......but firmware is kernel-agnostic. In other words, drivers for any given item must be compiled to work with whatever kernel you're using at the time - like GPU drivers - but firmware 'blobs' for individual drivers will continue to function across multiple kernel updates, because 'firmware' is specific only to the physical hardware (and chipsets, etc., aren't going to be 'swapped-out' every 5 minutes, are they? Once an electronic device is built - with the exception of computers themselves - that's usually that).

This perhaps explains why said 'firmware garbage' didn't occur this time around, especially if they didn't get over-written.....because they would already be in place.

I knew - within less than 2 months - that 'Puppy' was the one for me.


Mike. ;)
 
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MikeWalsh said:
I knew - within less than 2 months - that 'Puppy' was the one for me.
Click to expand...
I hear ya -- i like the minimalist thinking, especially with computing and other things that tend to be overly complex by default. There are exceptions though, vim is only good because it's a fairly bloated text editor with endless customization options (yet, simple as far as it being terminal based or gui-minimal)
 
Personally i'd never want to install any USB driver ever again! These things were blood suckers, a total nightmare hardly justifying even simulation in a virtual PC. USB3/SATA3 define my tolerance limit i guess! Installation alone caused my blood pressure to climb to new heights, just booting left me an impression of durable trauma... Nothing nostalgic about it, i'd rather regress to DOS 3.3 instead.
 
Does Expirion have an edge compared to the bleeding edge or some other valued aspect?
 
Egzoset said:
Does Expirion have an edge compared to the bleeding edge or some other valued aspect?
Click to expand...
The 5.0.1 version has kernel 6.9.7+bpo I added extra firmware that Debian/Devuan does not have in their default configuration, which give it better hardware support, it is based on Devuan 5.0.1 so it does not have systemd, it uses sysvinit instead, which makes it faster - so for Debian/Devuan based systems that are stable it is more on the bleeding edge side but is stable nonetheless - the kernel will not automatically update you will have to do that manually since the kernel is from the back-port repository, everything else updates normally through the Devuan repositories
 
Hummm... Maybe i'm missing some important detail but there seems an ambiguous situtation which i find difficult to resolve if not by date:

sourceforge.net

Expirion Linux

Download Expirion Linux for free. Expirion Linux 5.0.2 is based on Devuan 5 and does not use systemd but instead uses SysVInit. This has the Xfce Desktop - Some software that is included are LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird , Audacity, Brasero and VLC Media Player and uses Debian kernel...
sourceforge.net sourceforge.net
Expirion-5.0.1-Xfce-240808.iso​
2 days ago​
​
sourceforge.net

Expirion Linux

Download Expirion Linux for free. Expirion Linux 5.0.2 is based on Devuan 5 and does not use systemd but instead uses SysVInit. This has the Xfce Desktop - Some software that is included are LibreOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird , Audacity, Brasero and VLC Media Player and uses Debian kernel...
sourceforge.net sourceforge.net
Expirion-5.0.1-Xfce-240808.iso​
3 days ago​

Perhaps a BitTorrent could have helped with integrity verification, i'll try a comparison if possible!


P.S.: or maybe this where i'm supposed to go:

Expirion Linux - Browse Files at SourceForge.net

Expirion Linux 5.0.2 is based on Devuan 5 and does not use systemd but instead uses SysVInit. This has the Xfce Desktop - Some software that is…
sourceforge.net sourceforge.net
​
...and what would any objections be about those two?

devuan_excalibur_6.0-202406250952_amd64_desktop.iso 2024-06-25 06:13 3.9G​
devuan_excalibur_6.0-202406250951_i386_desktop.iso 2024-06-25 06:22 3.9G​
 
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