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Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

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Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#151

Post by fidelramos »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #141
marmshallow wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This takes the cake for unexpected comment of the night. Could you explain where you live (location and housing situation) and how you feed yourself? I'm genuinely curious.

I do not live in one place, I travel around. Sometimes I live outdoors, which I find comfortable with practice. I consider NYC my project's headquarters and it is where I stay majority of the time. I am sometimes housed by friends, family, and supporters of my software projects. For food, I primarily dumpster-dive.

Do you find something ethically wrong with selling your services to someone who would pay for them? Or is it that you don't want anyone telling you what to do? I'm honestly curious about the reasons for becoming freegan.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#152

Post by raducu »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #93
locao wrote: post #37

Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.

I've actually had quite a bit of motivation after moving out of my old apartment. I was able to unpack all of my electronics stuff and tools again. Previous place was way too small. Actually unpacking stuff triggered a lot of desire to do stuff with it again. One of the things I found was a tube full of rom-less 8051 microcontrollers and another tube of AM85C30 Dual UARTs I probably picked up at a robotics club swap…

I'm in the same boat -- too little space for my electronics hobby. I did buy an 200 mhz osciloscope, soldering microscope, hot air and new soldering iron though.

The only excuse to pull them out is to fix broken electronics/toys.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#153

Post by blaser-waffle »

myself248 wrote: post #133
kristopolous wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dealing with garbage tech is what brings me down. Completely broken, unusable garbage software is everywhere, backed by egos, emotions, power plays, and entrenchment. That's the part I don't want to deal with. The only thing worse than having to deal with a bunch of idiots is having to deal with a bunch of things made by them. It pisses me off how broken everything is and how few people seem to take issue with it. Ev…

This is why I save my vacation days up and take a big chunk once or twice a year, instead of frittering away fridays and mondays to have little "long weekends" throughout the year, as I did in the past. I discovered that, after 4 or 5 days of staycation, I've handled most of the crap that was hanging over my head. I've caught up on laundry, done whatever administrative stuff I had been procrastinating about, and I ca…

I'm super into the 3-day weekends, but I also agree with the extra long vacation-staycation thing, where you can just "be" for a while. Like 4 days of nothin & puttering around, followed by 2 days of cleaning & finally attending to {X,Y,Z}.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#154

Post by II2II »

pan69 wrote: post #48
znpy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, this video features a 486 cpu because linux dropped 386 support a while ago. https://www.zdnet.com/article/good-bye-386-linux-to-drop-sup...

I was always under the impression that Linux 386 simply meant 32 bit support. So, no 386 support would mean no 32 bit support rather than the 386 specifically.

I have seen i386 being used in a couple of contexts. For example, Debian uses it to refer to the 32-bit port[1]. It also seemed to be used when various Linux distributions built Pentium optimized packages when that became a thing. In that case 386 would be used for earlier 32-bit processors and 686 would be used for later 32-bit processors. So the nomenclature is not always clear.

[1] https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#155

Post by [deleted] »

robohoe wrote: post #52
locao wrote: post #37

Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.

I used to do this kind of stuff in junior high, high school, and college...back when I had the time now. Now with a day job it's time to find some time to muck around and really explore things with your curiosity and imagination. I totally see where you're coming from.

[deleted]

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#156

Post by happycube »

coolreader18 wrote: post #128
happycube wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another good cheap option if the Pi doesn't suit you is an up-cycled thin client - some HP T620 configs (quad AMD Jaguar, 4GB RAM, 16GB flash) are (There's also the T620 Pro, but those are going for a bit more these days since they make good home routers when you add a quad gig-e card...)

You can also always just find an old desktop box and install a lightweight distro on it -- my grandpa got a new computer a year or so ago so I took his ~10 year old HP box, wiped it, and installed alpine. Now I have it just plugged into my router and I have a few cron jobs and docker services that I run on it.

That too. Then again I'm old enough that seven year old computers should be ancient, but with a good video card and enough RAM/SSD they still do almost any job.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#157

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

kristopolous wrote: post #122
locao wrote: post #37

Does anyone else miss having this level of motivation? And that's not an isolation effect on me, I gave up on trying fun things like this for a long long time now.

Dealing with garbage tech is what brings me down. Completely broken, unusable garbage software is everywhere, backed by egos, emotions, power plays, and entrenchment. That's the part I don't want to deal with. The only thing worse than having to deal with a bunch of idiots is having to deal with a bunch of things made by them. It pisses me off how broken everything is and how few people seem to take issue with it. Ev…

Oh man do I know the feeling. I said to my boss not that long ago something along the lines of "modern software has taught me to hate technology". I day dream about leaving my career for something else. I'd even take a significant pay cut for it.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#158

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

happycube wrote: post #126
aksss wrote: post #20

The virtue of reusing an old system is somewhat eroded by the fact that its noise and power consumption exceed that of a more powerful Pi 3 B+, which can be had for $50-60 with case and power supply (circa 2020). I see little advantage in keeping the old hardware around anymore. I think I still have some old ISA cables downstairs in a box - high time to acknowledge to myself that I will NEVER use those again.

Another good cheap option if the Pi doesn't suit you is an up-cycled thin client - some HP T620 configs (quad AMD Jaguar, 4GB RAM, 16GB flash) are (There's also the T620 Pro, but those are going for a bit more these days since they make good home routers when you add a quad gig-e card...)

I happened to have received a small pile of that exact piece of kit a while back. It is easily capable of running a full desktop OS and playing older games. Absolutely ridiculous specs for a thin client.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#159

Post by jschwartzi »

pgtan wrote: post #19

Modern days Linux kernel requires a bootloader, as seen in the video. In the old days, you could dd the kernel to the floppy disk and use rdev to point to the root partition to start after loading the kernel.

There’s actually an EFI boot stub for the kernel so you don’t technically need a bootloader beyond the EFI on those systems.

Re: Booting a 486 from floppy with the most up-to-date stable Linux kernel

#160

Post by anthk »

kelnos wrote: post #104
MBCook wrote: post #69

I had no idea the Linux kernel still supported the 486. I thought you had to have a Pentium class or better.

Kernel support for 386 was dropped recently, but 486 and above are fine. I think many distros have probably dropped 486 support, though; someone upthread mentions that Debian is 686 and above only now.

Slackware may still work on 486.
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