From stable and pragmatic distros to their quirky counterparts, the Linux ecosystem is chock-full of cool distributions. But once you sift through Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, and other common distributions, you may encounter the wackier distros that prioritize laughs and giggles over performance and functionality. If you’re a Linux geek who grew up in the 2000s like me, you may already be familiar with Hannah Montana and, more importantly, the meme distribution centered around the show.

Unfortunately for me, I never got the chance to tinker with Linux distributions until I bought my first Raspberry Pi board. As such, Hannah Montana Linux remained out of my reach when the show was at the height of its popularity, and I never got the chance to mock my best buds by running the OS as a daily driver. But after forgetting about HML for years, I recently re-encountered it while researching obscure Linux distros. If you’ve already read some of my unhinged home lab projects, you can already guess where this is going. So, after spending an entire day trying to run Hannah Montana Linux, I can assure you that cringe isn’t the only reason why you shouldn’t use it as your primary OS.

A bare-metal installation of Hannah Montana Linux was impossible

The ancient OS refused to boot on three separate systems

While virtual machines are the simplest way to get Hannah Montana Linux running, I wanted to sink deeper into the rabbit hole by installing the distribution on a spare PC. For reference, the last version of HML was released more than a decade ago, and considering the state of Linux drivers back in the day, I couldn’t just load it onto my daily driver and expect things to work right off the bat.

So, I went for the oldest system in my computing lab – a Ryzen 5 1600 PC with a GTX 1080 that I often use when testing new NAS distros and server-centric operating systems. With the PC ready for a fresh coat of HML paint, I loaded the Hannah Montana Linux website to grab the ISO. And that’s where I hit the first of many roadblocks on this wacky project: the Tucows domain for the HML ISO is no longer operational, meaning I had to look elsewhere for the file. Good ol’ Internet Archive helped me out, and within a few minutes, the 650MB ISO was ready to be flashed onto a USB drive.

Once I’d flashed the drive, I followed the usual procedure of entering the BIOS by mashing the Del key as though it owed me rent money. But much to my chagrin, the USB drive was nowhere to be seen inside the Boot menu. Switching the firmware from UEFI to Legacy didn’t resolve the issue either. Fearing that the USB drive had failed, I grabbed a different flash drive, re-downloaded Hannah Montana Linux’s ISO, and used Balena Etcher to burn the image. This time, the USB drive showed up in the BIOS, though the PC refused to boot into HML.

Switching to a different tactic, I quickly configured an iVentoy server on my main PC, copied the ISO file to the right folder, and attempted to use PXE boot. Unfortunately, both ISO files displayed the same error. Since I really wanted to go for a bare-metal setup, I brought out my Aiffro K100 NAS and ZimaBoard 2 SBC, though the outcome was no different.

Virtual machines are the only way to run it

But my Proxmox server couldn’t handle its “greatness”

With the bare-metal setup a complete failure, I resigned myself to my fate and resorted to deploying the meme OS inside a virtual machine. Since I’m a staunch member of the Proxmox fan club, I uploaded the Hannah Montana Linux ISO to my dual-Xeon PVE server. To ensure that the ancient OS could run without any performance hiccups, I decided to go for an overkill setup by allocating 16 CPU cores and 16GB of memory to its VM.

Luckily, the virtual machine booted into the Hannah Montana Linux splash screen. With my morale at an all-time high since starting the project, I went with the first option to try out HML before installing it. As is typically the case with my experiments, the OS promptly crashed within the next couple of seconds. Since the error log showed a kernel panic, I tried modifying the CPU settings. Trying out the other options on the splash screen resulted in the same error. After spending several minutes troubleshooting the Proxmox VM, I gave up and switched to VirtualBox.

To my surprise, the VirtualBox VM booted right away, even though I’d allocated merely 4 cores and 8GB of RAM. Within a few seconds, I arrived at Hannah Montana Linux desktop… which was pretty much what I expected it to be.

Now I’m Hannah! Now I’m Linux! I'm a real OS

Good luck installing packages on this outdated distro

The over-the-top aesthetics aside, my first impression of Hannah Montana Linux wasn’t that bad. A few tweaks to the bright colors made it a lot more bearable, and I daresay I found the colorful scheme somewhat refreshing after staring at boring Linux distros and CLI systems for weeks. After configuring a couple of settings, the installation wizard took less than a minute to set up Hannah Montana Linux on the VM.

Unfortunately, the application suite left a lot to be desired. The Personal Information Manager was the only utility worth checking out in the Office section, though seeing the IRC Client app brought a smile to my face. While the File Browser looked decent, the distro didn’t have many useful services pre-installed – and the ones available were borderline unusable.

Take the Konqueror web browser, for instance. Loading any website resulted in an SSL negotiation failed error. Installing new packages was just as futile, as the OS would only connect to broken and non-existent links. I also tried to use the update prompt to upgrade Hannah Montana Linux to a newer version. But just as you’d expect, the wizard failed to acquire the update files, leaving me with a largely useless distro and shattered hopes of making my buddies facepalm at the sight of me using Hannah Montana Linux for everyday tasks.

Should you try running Hannah Montana Linux?

I usually try to consider the pros and cons of my wacky projects, but considering that half of the apps are unusable, there’s no reason to set up Hannah Montana Linux besides getting a taste of 2000s nostalgia. In hindsight, I’m low-key glad I couldn’t set up HML as a bare-metal distro, as an OS that dated is bound to be rife with security flaws and exploits. As for me, I’ll just go back to using Qubes OS as my favorite weird yet highly functional distribution.