31–40 of 151 posts
My 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.
That’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…
It was easier to do that back then than now... :)
Oh,and a grad student friend of mine warned me in 93... "That Web stuff is addictive"... so I avoided it for another 3-6 months and stuck to FTP sites and a bit of gopher/WAIS. :)
There are easier ways to do this. https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-...
It's pretty cool to get an up-to-date Linux working on such old hardware but I get the impression this kind of thing is going to get harder to do with the major distributions dropping support for 32 bit x86. I've been using NetBSD with older hardware.
Dating myself here ... I ran Linux on my 386SX black and white LCD laptop (including X windows!) back in the early Slackware days 1992-1994. It was easier to do that back then than now... :) Oh,and a grad student friend of mine warned me in 93... "That Web stuff is addictive"... so I avoided it for another 3-6 months and stuck to FTP sites and a bit of gopher/WAIS. :)
I 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…
Of course it can, 486s were common in Linux's early heyday. During my senior year of high school and freshman year of college ('97-'99) I ran Debian Slink on an IBM 486SX. X ran a little slow on it so I used it in console only mode. I mostly used it to do compsci homework. Before I settled on Debian full-time (still using it to this day) I used Red Hat, I think v5 (the original numbering, before RHEL). And before that probably Slackware on floppies. I eventually got an AMD K6-2 which ran a lot faster...
Of course, this article is about running modern Linux, but Debian Slink is still there to download and install and I'm sure it works just peachy.
The section on configuring the kernel really gives me nostalgia as I used to build my own kernels back then, something I haven't done in years.
In ~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 fill…