Older laptops, linux, usability

Yes this is from April 2020

Exhibit 1
IBM Thinkpad A21m
Pentium III 750Mhz

512 MB RAM

ATI rage mobility
1024x768 display

Exhibit 2
Dell Inspiron 8500

Mobile Pentium 4 2.6 Ghz/1.2Ghz 

512 MB RAM

nvidia geforce4 4200

1920x1200 display

The surprise (to someone who started linux by juggling slackware floppies and CDs) is that all recent distros I tried at least came up to X. But they were generally slow because of lack of hardware rendering. Wifi was not always straightforward with b43 support.

Previously installed older distros (Debian 3.1, 5) on (1) laptop was not very usable - SSL . Windows XP after more than a decade of accumulation was very slow.

After many trials (included kernel recompiles which took overnight) with Debian 10, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Mint, Antix, Arch, and other distros, I converged on just doing what was done before - follow previous directions. Maybe I'll yet try to backport learnings to a newer distro.

Exhibit (2) turned out to be easier to get going than Exhibit (1) .

wifi with b43 turned out to be easier than hardware rendering

(2) Mint 13 with nvidia drivers
Tux racer works great

3.2.0-23-generic
xorg-server 2:1.11.4-0ubuntu10.17

(1) Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" with compiled mach64.ko and drm.ko
Tux racer not great. But good usability otherwise.
Firefox / SSL problem still exists. I dug out CDRW because this won't start from USB directly. And 2/4  discs didn't boot completely.

The linksys wifi card (WPC600N) only seemed to work well with ndiswrapper.

References:
http://www.bakarasse.de/pages/en/linux/3d-with-ati-mach64/ubuntu-hardy.php?lang=EN
    precompiled .ko were hard to download
    Using source from here, I was able to compile the modules. They sometimes loaded when using startx or X -config from console, but hard hang when starting X from boot.

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21945

    I used ab582f64fd54565f66eba866972f0fe2c313f000 from https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/drm.git
    This worked for me.

    I tried changing IRQs from 11 to see if that had a dependence (Bios-config-PCI). It mostly made things worse.

    Adding agp_mode 2, made things go haywire.

2.6.24-32-386
X.Org X Server 1.4.0.90

Write to me if you want to look at xorg.conf or /var/log/Xorg.0.log