NeoMagic & Savage Linux X.Org Drivers Updated For Late 90's Graphics

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NeoMagic & Savage Linux X.Org Drivers Updated For Late 90's Graphics

Longtime X.Org release wrangler Alan Coopersmith at Oracle spent some of his Easter working out new releases of seldom-touched X.Org graphics/display drivers...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/X.Org-Savage-Neomagic-2023

[M@GOid]

I find it curious what the experience is of running a up-to-date Linux distro in one of those 20 YO things, even if it is tailored for old and weak machines. I installed a 2022 distro on a 10 years old AMD C50 cpu laptop and the thing just craws to reach the desktop. Running Ubuntu 12.04 on it is a much quicker experience.

[rene]

while we shipped the hotfixes already, A.I. updated by our Data: https://t2sde.org/packages/xf86-video-savage https://t2sde.org/packages/xf86-video-neomagic

[Vistaus]

I find it curious what the experience is of running a up-to-date Linux distro in one of those 20 YO things, even if it is tailored for old and weak machines. I installed a 2022 distro on a 10 years old AMD C50 cpu laptop and the thing just craws to reach the desktop. Running Ubuntu 12.04 on it is a much quicker experience.

Depends on the DE. I've used Bodhi on a secondary laptop from 1998 for years and that thing was about 15 years old at that point. Sure, it wasn't a competitor for new hardware and was slow to launch heavier apps like even a modern web browser, but the desktop started quickly and one a heavier app was loaded, it worked perfectly. Even modern HTML5 stuff worked great in the browser. And mind you: not only was that laptop about 15 years old, it was also a 1998 midranger at best (maybe even less than midrange).

[Vorpal]

I find it curious what the experience is of running a up-to-date Linux distro in one of those 20 YO things, even if it is tailored for old and weak machines. I installed a 2022 distro on a 10 years old AMD C50 cpu laptop and the thing just craws to reach the desktop. Running Ubuntu 12.04 on it is a much quicker experience.

While I haven't gone back to the 90s, I managed to run early-mid 00 laptops on modern Arch32 with i3. Runs just fine, though boot time suffers on mechanical HDDs. (But that used to be slow back then too! We just gotten used to SSDs.) Couldn't use the terminal emulator I normally use though, since it needed a newer OpenGL.

[Old Nobody]

I find it curious what the experience is of running a up-to-date Linux distro in one of those 20 YO things, even if it is tailored for old and weak machines. I installed a 2022 distro on a 10 years old AMD C50 cpu laptop and the thing just craws to reach the desktop. Running Ubuntu 12.04 on it is a much quicker experience.

Installed Debian 10 with XFCE as desktop environment and midori browser on an Tualatin Celeron (Pentium 3 core, overclocked to 1,7 GHz, 1,5 GByte RAM) a month ago. So S3 Savage era. Should be a little bit slower than your AMD C50.
Takes 4-5 minutes to boot to the desktop (NFS root, no HDD). Browsing the web is painfully slow, Libreoffice takes a while to start but is usable then.
It's about the same "speed" as running a desktop environment on a Raspberry Pi 3.
I would not recommend it to anyone.

15 years old AMD Phenom or Intel Core 2 machines are totally usable for todays web, Youtube or office stuff. But nothing older. 5 years development (competition between AMD and Intel was quite hefty in that times) and multicore make an ENORMOUS difference!

[Eirikr1848]

Installed Debian 10 with XFCE as desktop environment and midori browser on an Tualatin Celeron (Pentium 3 core, overclocked to 1,7 GHz, 1,5 GByte RAM) a month ago. So S3 Savage era. Should be a little bit slower than your AMD C50.
Takes 4-5 minutes to boot to the desktop (NFS root, no HDD). Browsing the web is painfully slow, Libreoffice takes a while to start but is usable then.
It's about the same "speed" as running a desktop environment on a Raspberry Pi 3.
I would not recommend it to anyone.

15 years old AMD Phenom or Intel Core 2 machines are totally usable for todays web, Youtube or office stuff. But nothing older. 5 years development (competition between AMD and Intel was quite hefty in that times) and multicore make an ENORMOUS difference!

systemd simply isn’t going to cut it for that machine. Something like Artix, Void, or Gentoo (if you have a lot of time) with openrc would make quite the difference. Same with using an mSATA to IDE adapter for an SSD w a lot of swap.

I’ve got a Dual Pentium III Xeon machine and it struggles under Arch with systemd but is fine with Artix using OpenRC

[M@GOid]

Depends on the DE. I've used Bodhi on a secondary laptop from 1998 for years and that thing was about 15 years old at that point. Sure, it wasn't a competitor for new hardware and was slow to launch heavier apps like even a modern web browser, but the desktop started quickly and one a heavier app was loaded, it worked perfectly. Even modern HTML5 stuff worked great in the browser. And mind you: not only was that laptop about 15 years old, it was also a 1998 midranger at best (maybe even less than midrange).

I managed to grab the i386 version of Bodhi 5.1 and I'm impressed. The C50 managed to boot it to desktop under 30s, using a old Kingston SSD I have laying around. And the RAM consumption was under 200 MB, on par with LXDE but with far nicer looks and packed with more config options. The terminal emulator (Terminology) is nice too with the theme they implemented. So far I'm keeping it for this machine and probably will use it on other older stuff I will come across in lieu of LXDE based distros.