Linux on a 486SX
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Linux on a 486SX
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Re: Linux on a 486SX
#2Awesome and thanks for documenting the process! There's large DOS communities with people running vintage hardware, but not much I know of for linux.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#3Few months ago, somebody did a series of live streaming events on bringing up a 486-based tablet PC (which happened to be an old voting machine) with modern linux. Kernel turned out to be the easy part. Booting grub from BIOS that doesn't support LBA addressing (CHS only) - a bit harder. Running X11 on hardware without PCI - ridiculously hard:
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#4Remember the days back in 90‘ (Must have been 1994) when installing Slackware distribution on 486 DX from about 15 floppy disks to the internal HDD.
Had running Linux as web proxy until about 2001. Interesting to see that what was quite normal at that time has become to a topic of interest again.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#5I have an old Am586 in a drawer that I could send this guy. At least he would have a math coprocessor.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#6Ah, those were the days. There is a long list of dmesg outputs from linux on many old systems, while not as old as the 486, there is an AMD K6/2... and sparcs!
http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg_index.html
The TRI-m in that list was a 486, although not modern linux. http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg/dmesg_machz.html
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#7In ~2006 I was gifted a 486 desktop by my neighbour, it was a Mitac 486 running Windows 3.1 and DOS. It came with a matching VGA monitor. It had a floppy drive, 160MB hard disk and DIN keyboard. The mouse was fitted to a serial port. There was no sound card; sound was achieved by a driver that somehow bunged PCM through the PC speaker.
Unfortunately it didn't survive a household clear out 3 years later, and that fills me with regret. Maybe I could've been trying my own projects on it now. I always liked the relative simplicity of the OS and hardware.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#8Few months ago, somebody did a series of live streaming events on bringing up a 486-based tablet PC (which happened to be an old voting machine) with modern linux. Kernel turned out to be the easy part. Booting grub from BIOS that doesn't support LBA addressing (CHS only) - a bit harder. Running X11 on hardware without PCI - ridiculously hard: https://diode.zone/w/kMhja4oBUvP6CScsiDZP38
Perhaps this was addressed in the video, but I wonder if that tinkerer tried LILO? It is still supported and might fare better with old hardware.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#9[deleted]
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#10Remember the days back in 90‘ (Must have been 1994) when installing Slackware distribution on 486 DX from about 15 floppy disks to the internal HDD. Had running Linux as web proxy until about 2001. Interesting to see that what was quite normal at that time has become to a topic of interest again.
To add a fun story where Linux saved my live. Back in the 90‘ we had a Clipper / dBASE based DOS app used for capturing orders in a call center after TV commercials. In this case a prime TV show to generate donations. Full house with >100 agents busy. Then the Novell Netware server crashed, and was unable to mount the disks.
We managed to switch the users to an older server so they could continue to work. But it first seemed the HDD and files got corrupted and unrecoverable by disk tools from Netware. We thought of using a commercial recovery service, but this would cause delay and cost $$$$.
So I removed the disks from Netware, fired up a Linux PC, connected the HDD to the Adaptec SCSI (Luckily install prior for a CD drive). The file system was not mountable, but something like dd /dev/sdb1 |strings „JJJJMMDD“ discovered lots of salvage records.
This literally saved my ass and the company.