Older Hardware - Pentium D

Rocky Linux General
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I’ve seen the other thread on this topic. I was trying an install of 8.8 on older hardware for an experiment. It has a Pentium D processor. That is 64 bit and does support VM’s but the installer runs very slowly and than hangs. That CPU has run Centos 6 in the past.

I guess I’m out of luck on that hardware…

Thanks

Ken

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How much memory is on it? Wouldn’t be surprised if that was the issue.

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Thank you Brian. 4 Gig Ram. I was a bit surprised that the installer stalled.

I’ll try memtest.

Thanks Ken

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OK Fixed it. I tried a number of older bits of hardware here. One with a Core 2 Duo 6300 will run Debian12 Live (6.1 Kernel) but also stalls with the Rocky Installer.

I swapped the CPU in the machine that had a Pentium D to a Pentium Dual Core E2180 (SLA8Y) CPU. Approx a year newer. That boots the Rocky Installer just fine on the hardware that failed before with the Pentium D (SL9AP)

The working CPU (E2180) lacks Virtualization but has SSSE3 instruction set extensions that the Pentium D does not have. In that experiment Virt does not matter.

Thanks Ken

5

Red Hat does have a tendency to deprecate older hardware, more so with EL9 when it only supports x86_64-v2 and higher - in these cases Debian also worked fine as Debian doesn’t seem to deprecate too much older hardware as such. Just something to bear in mind since Rocky is 1:1 with RHEL.

I too have a Dell PowerEdge 800 series server with Pentium IV 2GHz that is able to do virtualisation. A server from approx 2006, so am most likely to have issues with that too. I haven’t used it for years though, mostly due to a hardware issue that I couldn’t rely on for production stuff. That said, the server will be slow now anyway so not really up to doing too much. And when I did, it had Debian on it.

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Sometimes a BIOS upgrade can also help. Just a thought…

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I thought the same. I did upgrade the BIOS. That was an interesting game for this older ASRock motherboard it involved finding a floppy disk drive in my parts bin and copying the various files from their web site, which were still there. Remarkably Win10 can still format a floppy disk. :slight_smile:

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