In this presentation, I will share our community's ongoing exploration of running modern and "standard" Linux distributions on vintage hardware - AOSC OS/Retro. AOSC OS/Retro, as an official branch of AOSC OS (the modern-device-facing mainline), runs a generally similar feature set - systemd, Glibc/Binutils/GCC/Coreutils/Util-Linux, X.org/Mesa, etc. and shares the same source tree with the latter.
With over a year of spending our spare time on the project, tweaking features, designing a desktop experience, and optimising compiler flags, we have a usable distribution that could run on systems as slow as a 486SX, and as fast as "modern" Core Duo systems. We also have an active effort to port AOSC OS/Retro across multiple architectures, with the tally currently standing at eight architectures - and counting (alpha, armv4, armv6hf, armv7hf, i486, loongson2f, powerpc, ppc64). We still have a long list of issues to solve, such as login delays and throttled I/O on ISA-based systems. I hope to gather feedback and criticism through this presentation.
Speakers: Mingcong Bai