This is one of the major reasons why I love Hacker News because of small side passion projects like this. At Hacker News we don't ask why, we ask why not!
Linux on a 486SX
21–30 of 151 posts
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#22That’s how I started out running Linux! Downloading a bunch of floppies from a BBS over a 16.8k USR HST modem. It was like a magical world when I first installed it. I also had a giant paper book that explained how to use it. For some reason the vi instructions in the book baffled me, but emacs seemed normal.
Six months later I finally got the disks for X11. My mind was blown. Real multitasking - not like DESQView or OS/2.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#23My first Linux install was in 1994, on a 486DX/2-66 with 8MB of RAM. At the time it was considered standard hardware and Linux ran really well on it.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#24I had a 486DX laptop that I ran Linux on from about 1995-1999, I probably tossed it around 2001 when the battery was pretty dead and the HDD was dying.
In some ways that was some of the best times for Linux on the desktop in my experience. Windows and Mac were such an unreliable mess at that point that Linux seemed very competitive at the time. A lot of the advanced hardware integration in Win/Mac hadn’t happened yet and Linux was very lean and mean and reliable. Both KDE and Gnome appeared in 1997 IIRC and the desktop was decent even if some apps weren’t as good.
My machine was 75mhz, 12MB RAM, 250mb HDD, 800x600 color LCD that had poor refresh. It got me through most of my college CS programming projects, though I eventually built a Linux tower too. X was good on that laptop the first few years but was really slow by 1998.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#25I just remembered compiling an early 2.0.xx kernel on an old 386DX AT&T server that was given to me when I was a teenager in the 90s. It spent hours doing it and I loved watching gcc take several seconds to compile each file! I also recall that the hard drive in that thing must have weighed at least 40lbs. Those were fun days!
Here's an eBay item that is pretty much exactly what I had back then: https://www.ebay.com/itm/294597619526?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=...
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Indeed, Slackware still defaults to LILO/eLILO and it works perfectly fine on modern hardware, older hardware from LILO's heyday should be no issue at all. I still hang on to a PIII based Dell Latitude laptop from 2001 and Slackware -current runs surprisingly well on it (along with BeOS 5.1 from my original disc, QNX RTOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and a few other obscure OSes from its generation to today).
All of those booting on one machine?
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#27IDE -> Compact Flash adapters are good for hardware of this era. new CF cards are cheap.
Booting from CDROM was still iffy and some BIOS might not like some drives and so on as i recall.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#28I had a 486DX laptop that I ran Linux on from about 1995-1999, I probably tossed it around 2001 when the battery was pretty dead and the HDD was dying. In some ways that was some of the best times for Linux on the desktop in my experience. Windows and Mac were such an unreliable mess at that point that Linux seemed very competitive at the time. A lot of the advanced hardware integration in Win/Mac hadn’t happened yet…
I had a similar machine in 1996 running Slackware as a server for qmail.
Hard not to be nostalgic over that time but things are so much better now. One command with AWS CLI and I can spin up a Linux box in 3 seconds today.
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#29There are easier ways to do this.
https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-...
Re: Linux on a 486SX
#30Remember 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.
In 1996, as a teenager, I had a ThinkPad laptop with a 486SX, 4 MB of RAM, and a 3.5" floppy drive. There was something weird about the floppy drive in that laptop that prevented stock Linux of that time from being able to work with it. But I was determined to get Slackware installed. Back then, Linux had the UMSDOS filesystem, which implemented a POSIX-capable filesystem on top of a directory tree on a DOS partition. And there was a DOS program called loadlinn that could boot into Linux from DOS. So I first installed Slackware using UMSDOS onto the DOS partition on my mother's PC, then transferred the linux directory tree from her PC to my laptop. I don't remember if I did that transfer using floppies or a null modem cable. Finally I removed the linux directory from my mother's PC. I did all of this while the rest of my family was away from home, so they never knew.
I later learned that I could add "floppy=thinkpad" to the kernel command line to enable support for the floppy drive in my ThinkPad model. Then I got brave and resized my DOS partition, using one of the free DOS-based partitioning tools available at the time, so I could have a real Linux filesystem.