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Linux on a 486SX

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Re: Linux on a 486SX

#41

Post by the_grue »

mwcampbell wrote: post #30
outsidein wrote: post #4

Remember 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…

I went that route on a school PC in 1998. There was no floppy drive, so I installed a Linux distro (also Slackware, iirc) onto the Windows partition, then resized the Windows partition with Partition Magic and used the existing Linux as a bootstrap for a fresh install on its own partition. It was so incredibly magical. No one had any idea I was doing it, and I felt part of the hacker culture :) I tinkered with it for a few of months at least, and eventually was compiling my own kernels, playing with boot/swap partitions, etc. Never got X to work, though.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#42

Post by immmmmm »

makes me remember when i installed slackware 1.0 on the family's 386 when my dad bought a fresh 486dx. ah the joy of getting an X server running and recompiling kernel!!

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#43

Post by phendrenad2 »

Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386, but because the kernel is a non-modular spaghetti-code mess, they had to deprecate 386 support to fix something else. It's only a matter of time before 486 is gone too.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#44

Post by mmcgaha »

300bps wrote: post #28
ben7799 wrote: post #24

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…

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.

Sure, its great now if you want to get actual work done, but which is more fun?

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#45

Post by xianwen »

morganvachon wrote: post #19
HeckFeck wrote: post #8

Earlier 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).

Some modern laptops support only UEFI booting, when booting from internal hard drive. Does LILO/eLILO support UEFI booting?

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#46

Post by nousermane »

xianwen wrote: post #45
morganvachon wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Some modern laptops support only UEFI booting, when booting from internal hard drive. Does LILO/eLILO support UEFI booting?

Yes. "e" in "eLILO" stands for "EFI".

But then (U)EFI is an OS in itself, you can boot Linux directly from it, no bootloader needed:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFISTUB

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#47

Post by knorker »

jggonz wrote: post #25

I 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/…

By "hard drive" I assume you mean "computer"?

Yeach. Yeah I had two of those when they were being thrown out. MCA was a really horrible bus between ISA and PCI. I recall it not wanting to boot unless you installed drivers for all your cards into the BIOS, or something.

So not only did your OS need drivers, but your BIOS did too.

I may misremember.

Compiling the kernel was basically an overnight operation, IIRC.

But yeah they were built like tanks. Even the power switch felt like you were turning the power back on to the fences in Jurassic Park.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#48

Post by marttt »

gregw2 wrote: post #33

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. :)

> "That Web stuff is addictive"

Prophetic declaration of the day. I'm envisioning a great hacker t-shirt: "That Web stuff is addictive... stick to FTP (a friend, 1993)"

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#49

Post by mwcampbell »

nousermane wrote: post #46
xianwen wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some modern laptops support only UEFI booting, when booting from internal hard drive. Does LILO/eLILO support UEFI booting?

Yes. "e" in "eLILO" stands for "EFI". But then (U)EFI is an OS in itself, you can boot Linux directly from it, no bootloader needed: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFISTUB

> But then (U)EFI is an OS in itself

Would it be accurate to describe (U)EFI as being like MS-DOS (i.e. single-tasking), but running in protected mode?

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#50

Post by gattilorenz »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #43

Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386, but because the kernel is a non-modular spaghetti-code mess, they had to deprecate 386 support to fix something else. It's only a matter of time before 486 is gone too.

> because the kernel is a non-modular spaghetti-code mess,

Laughs in Tanenbaum

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