Donate your old computers to Lucy’s Hearth, we will resuscitate them.

From Flex to Mint

Flex and Old Computers

After the announcement of the project, several people generously donated theri old computers. I excietedly tried to install Flex and immediately received an error messgae ....

Flex cannot be installed on this computer.

Oh Oh!

There then followed a couple of days of panic googling about installing Flex on old computers.

The short version of the problem is that beginning in the early 200s computers underwent a major upgrade from 32 to 64 bits and Flex does not run on 32 bit computers.

I eventually found a brief note at the bottom of a long, technical web site that said ... "Why not use Mint?"

Mint?

The rest, as they say, is history. I discovered that Mint seems to run on any old working hardware. Also, the default installation includes many more useful packages than Flex did.

For our goal of restoring old computers, Mint seems like a much better option than Flex.

My google searches went from "old computers" to "really old computers."

The Transition to 64 Bits

  • Early 2000s: The first consumer-grade 64-bit processors, such as the AMD Athlon 64 and Intel Itanium, were introduced.
  • 2005-2006: Microsoft released Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, providing support for 64-bit computing.
  • 2007-2009: The release of Windows Vista and later Windows 7 further promoted 64-bit computing.
  • Late 2000s - Early 2010s: The transition to 64-bit computing became more pronounced as software developers began optimizing their applications for 64-bit architectures.
  • 2012 and Beyond: By the early 2010s, the majority of new computers were shipping with 64-bit processors and operating systems.

The transition from 32-bit to 64-bit computing spanned a decade, with significant progress made in hardware, operating systems, and software to support the new architecture. Today, 64-bit computing is ubiquitous, with virtually all modern computers and operating systems supporting 64-bit architectures.

Impact on the BIOS

In order to install Mint it is necessary to start the computer from a USB disc. That requires getting into the BIOS to prevent the computer from starting Windows or Mac OS.

The transition to 64 bits had a significant impact on the BIOS:

  1. Firmware Support: Older BIOS versions did not fully support 64-bit hardware. Manufacturers took a while to make their hardware compatible with 64-bit processors and systems.
  2. Extended Memory Handling: 64-bit systems can address a larger amount of memory than 32-bit systems. BIOS routines needed to be updated to properly handle expanded memory.
  3. UEFI Adoption: The transition to 64-bit computing coincided with the adoption of UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) as a replacement for the traditional BIOS. UEFI provided more advanced security features and support for 64-bit systems.

Thus, the 32 to 64 bit transition dramatically affected the BIOS and to use older computers, we needed a version of Linux that could handle both the new and old BIOS.

Fortunately, Mint does that.

Our resuscitation record for the oldest computer brought back to life is a 2008 Compaq that seems to happily run a 32 bit version of Mint.