I need some help finding a distro for a very old machine.

It’s my family’s old desktop with 2001 components (bought in 2004) and a Pentium CPU that is NOT i686. I checked the exact model and architecture once but I don’t remember it now. The only thing I remember is that it’s not i686 so 99% of modern 32 bit distros don’t work on it (stuck right after grub).

The machine has 1 Gb of DDR1 RAM though so I think it may be useful or at least fun to play around with.

Now it’s on Windows XP that runs quite well but doesn’t support modern SSL certificates so it can’t browse the internet (idk how to fix it ok?).

A long time ago I tried to run multiple distros in live mode on it and got only one (Puppy) to work. Display, sound, ethernet and pretty much everything worked fine. GPU seemed to be an issue though because NVidia and I couldn’t install the driver (it was skill issue and I think it’s possible to do). But now it doesn’t work for some reason.

Are there any Linux distros or other operating systems (preferably not deprecated) that I can install on it? And btw it does have bootable USB support.

EDIT: There are way too many answers and a lot of ones that don’t mind the architecture limitations. I’m grateful to everyone who replied but I have to close this discussion now and I will not reply to further answers. I have received enough information and I cannot physically read so many replies.

  • nyan@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    12 days ago

    If it were an Itanium, the OP would know it. They’re not common (and I doubt Puppy would have booted on such a system—it isn’t compatible with x86).

    Also, support for that arch is being dropped from the Linux kernel as of 6.7.0, so looking for a supporting distro would be a fool’s quest (Gentoo still technically offers Itanium packages, but they’re on the way out.)