magda

Back in 2009, the antiX devs foresaw that usb flash drives would be the wave of the future for live Linux media. During the ensuing eight years antiX has been refining their live-usb technology striving to improve the live-usb experience and to find new and unique ways for making use of fast read-write live boot media.

Proudly calling itself “anti-fascist” and “systemd-free”, antiX is a Linux distribution not only aims to be used as a live USB system but also an extremely lightweight OS that can be run on very old machines such as “256MB old systems”. The rather bold claims don't end here, in fact “antiX can also be used as a fast-booting rescue cd and works extremely well running ‘live’ with or without ‘persistence’ on a usb stick or ‘frugal’ on a hard drive. Customize your own version with our live ‘remaster’ tools or create ‘snapshots’ of an installed system” with the project's so-called “antiX Magic”.

Luckily, I still got two old and fully-functioning computers, running Windows Vista and Windows 7 Starter, respectively. Unfortunately, despite owning two more computers that are much older than the two I would end up using for this test, both require some time-consuming repairs and only one – the Workstation running Windows 2000 that is physically (!) locked and came without a key – meets the minimum requirements for antiX.

Boot

Before booting antiX, the user is being presented with a bootloader allowing to change basic settings, such as language, timezone, and resolution, and set certain boot options, such as how antiX will boot (either LIVE or FRUGAL) or which one of the 1 available desktop sessions should be loaded. Additional flags can be set to, for example, to set the live system's clock after the boot process finished.

On both machines, I kept the default seetings, with the expection of timezone, in place. Surprisingly, the boot process took approximately 55 seconds on my 12 years old netbook, while the Hyrican tower, built in 2007 but providing nearly identical hardware resources, needed up to five minutes to provide me a working desktop, with the kernel loading process not only being significantly slower but repeatedly freezing for a few seconds.

Hyrican

Right off the bat, antiX wants me to configure my network connection, automatically starting a network manager tool called Connman. Due to this PC only being able to connect to the internet via cable and being a little too bulky to position it closer to my router, I went on using antiX as a pure offline live system for the remainder of this part of my test, checking out pre-installed programs.

This distribution's packed with quite many applications – impressive, considering the ISO's size is a mere 1.2 GB, but also odd, as some programs, such as “Poor Man's Radio” and YouTube player might be a bit “too much” (or, in my case, useless) for some users. For some others, it might be useful that antiX provides LibreOffice and even Mahjongg out of the box.

Performance

Surprisingly enough, antiX, despite requiring little resources when idle, performed rather buggy within the first minutes, causing screen tearing when moving windows accross the desktop. It wasn't possible for me to determine whether this was caused by nouveau or the kernel itself, considering the latter struggled noticeably upon booting and screen tearing magically disappearing after approximately six minutes. No other graphical issues would occur after that.

Progressing further, I discovered a tool printing system information without having to type and execute commands manually. As “Full information” would execute inxi with a set flag I didn't know up until then, the output was incomplete due to this command requiring root privileges. I had to enter the command manually and briefly got distracted by this old machine being vulnerable to Meltdown and both Spectre variants.

My amusement did not last long, however. While uname -a correctly detected the system's architecture, egrep -c\lm\/proc/cpufreg determined that my old tower must run on 64-bit architecture. That'd be an unhealthy configuration for such an old computer with only 1 GB of RAM and an ATA HDD, eh?

eMachines

Again, antiX starts Connman to set up an internet connection. Unfortunately, due to the netbook's small screen causing the bottom buttons to be hidden behind the task bar and Agent Input's window already being set to its smallest size, I was unable to set a wifi connection and thus was forced to connect via Ethernet.

Performance

Strangely enough, antiX required a little more RAM than on the Hyrican tower but less CPU resources. The system ran smoothly and responded quickly to any input.

Package Management & Documentation

antiX offers four tools to install and remove software: apt, Package Installer, Synaptic, and a CLI tool named cli-aptix, which is being described as being “similar to Synaptic”. Out of the box, it's impossible to find any non-installed packages without doing a sudo apt update to fetch the latest databases first. Whilst downloading neofetch, the CPU would spike to a whopping 74%.

At that point, I began to question how it's possible for antiX, which relies on an entirely different init system, to be able to run all regular .deb packages. Checking the available documentation, I could not even figure out which init system antiX actually is using due to Conky stating nothing but “init”. The online wiki only states that antiX offers two flavours, running either SysV or runit – when I downloaded antix-full, all mirrors only listed one single ISO for full, base, core, and net, respectively, and the bootloader did not grant me an option to change the init system, either. Both online wiki and offline documentation also do not give any insight into how antiX is able to run .deb packages, but not any packages pulled from PPA. Overall, I ended up being more confused and gave up trying to figure those mysteries out after checking the forum that could not provide any clear answers, either.

Performance Commonalities & Other Observations

While documentation states that it's possible to choose a different keyboard layout prior to booting, I noticed it being entirely dependent on the language the user chooses and can only be circumvented by overwriting boot parameters. I honestly do not get why language and timezone can be changed directly with just a few key presses while changing the keyboard layout is hidden behind a boot parameter that needs to be set manually and only can be done via said boot parameter; the live system does not offer a GUI tool to change the keyboard layout post-boot, which is even more odd due to the sheer amount of (many useless) GUI tools this distributions offers out of the box.

After getting fed up with QWERTY, I decided to boot the live system one more time, setting the system's language to German. As expected, the desktop not only provides “the Denglish experience” by using German in some places and English in others but also some quite noticeable misspellings and the keyboard layout actually only changing after pressing any key.

Before finishing, both machines started to heat up significantly; while the netbook would heat up just like when it's running Windows 7 Starter, the tower produced more heat than when running Windows Vista and began to sound strange, indicating that the CPU was running on its maximum speed even prior to opening heavy programs like Firefox, which later would push the CPU to 100% usage.

TL;DR

For a project that brags more than once about being “systemd-free” and being suited for older hardware, it was disappointing to find out that antiX cannot compete with Puppy Linux in the slightest and turned out to be just as “hungry” as both Windows Vista and Windows 7 Starter combined. Unlike Puppy, antiX does not offer any tools to adjust CPU speed, which is far more crucial than a low RAM print, and offers little to no documentation regarding its compatibility with .deb packages, the system's init system(s), and how to make antiX run on hardware that's even older than what I used for this test.

And keeping that in mind, the project also bragging about being “anti-fascist” just proves that this distribution is being maintained by developers who actually could not care less about older hardware and why they cannot be “kept alive” in an era that pretty much demands a persistent internet connection and the usage of adipose software. No amount of additional RAM or a more powerful GPU cannot make up for the relative lack of CPU power old machines, unfortunately, possess in contrast to today's demands. Any “outdated” OS still works and it's only being recommended to not use them for any online activities due to unpatched vulnerabilites – and I would recommend anyone trying to “revive” their old machines to just stick to what's already installed by using it as an offline workstation or “retro gaming machine”, rather than to attempt to use, by modern standards, an underpowered machine to watch YouTube videos and do online shopping or banking.

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Hardware

eMachines eM250 KAV60

Processor: Intel Atom CPU N270 @ 1.60 GHz

Display: Intel Mobile 945GSE Express Integrated Graphics Controller

Memory: 1 GB (990 MB)

Storage: 160 GB Seagate ATA Disk ST9160314AS

Network: Broadcom BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY & Qualcomm Atheros AR8132 Fast Ethernet

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Hyrican PC PCK02282

Processor: Intel Pentium Dual E1240

Display: NVIDIA G86 (GeForce 8400 GS)

Memory: 1 GB (999.9 MB)

Storage: 150 GB Western Digital Caviar Blue Serial ATA WD1600AABS-00PRA0

Network: Realtek RTL-8110SC/8169SC Gigabit Ethernet