Desperate times call for desperate measures, and since the Lowarch web site has gone offline (presumably the account expired), I’ve taken it upon myself to post my remaining copy of the 0.1.1 ISO online, both as a direct download and as a torrent on LinuxTracker.

Lowarch, in case you don’t know what that is, was an i586 recompile of Arch Linux, and did amazing things for pre-i686 machines. Short of compiling it all yourself, it’s hard to find a faster, more impressive tool for recovering K6-series or similar hardware.

Unfortunately, the “developer” behind Lowarch abandoned the project, the web site fell unattended, and around the last day of 2008, the home page began to show an account closure message. That’s how it goes, when a distro finally dies.

But Banquo’s ghost is still hanging around, since I still have an ISO for it, and I’m sure there are others out there. And given that it’s possible to use third-party repositories to bring a Lowarch system up to date, it’s not worth throwing the whole business away.

This is the first time I’ve ever made a torrent, so I’m not sure how well it will work. LinuxTracker seems happy though, and with any luck it should be fine. As a guide I used this ancient “how-to” on Linux.com, although I used mktorrent out of the Crux repositories, rather than CreateTorrent or MakeTorrent. The ideas are the same, and it appears to have succeeded.

If you have a little bandwidth, and you don’t mind keeping Lowarch alive for a little while longer, download the torrent and let’s see if it works as expected. Who knows, maybe we’ll be helping out someone with an old Pentium system. … 🙄