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Apparently they meant to say "modern Linux on a 486SX" as, obviously, Linux ran just fine on a 486 back when all this stuff was new. (Mine was a 486DX/33, but with 4GB of RAM. Compiling a kernel took 8 hours, but I digress.)
Wonder how long it took to sequentially scan 4GB of RAM
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!
I still maintain that after hardware ages a little, Linux (and perhaps other free operating systems and distros) are the only way to give a soul to the machine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In 1995, I was stationed at an Army base about 10 miles from the DMZ in Korea, and for the first time in my life I saved up enough money to build a computer from modern parts instead of scavenging them from thrift stores and dumpsters. So I went AWOL for a day and went down to a place in Seoul called the Yongsan Electronics Market. To my young American mind, this was a place straight out of a William Gibson novel. Im…
I really wish cities in the US had those kind of sprawling electronics markets. So cool and useful. Like if you just need a single SPDT switch instead of a 20 pack on Amazon… you can’t do that right now.
Apparently they meant to say "modern Linux on a 486SX" as, obviously, Linux ran just fine on a 486 back when all this stuff was new. (Mine was a 486DX/33, but with 4GB of RAM. Compiling a kernel took 8 hours, but I digress.)
> a 486DX/33, but with 4GB of RAM Wonder how long it took to sequentially scan 4GB of RAM
By the time I got into installing Linux (1996+), I always seemed to be able to find salvageable pentium machines 166Mhz and above. But, my sister ended up returning my old AMD 486 DX4 120Mhz after they bought a new computer. I threw FreeBSD on it for a bit. It ran really well! I'll forever miss this era of computing. The internet was brand new, machines were often Frankensteins built out of spare parts. Computer Shop…
In 1995, I was stationed at an Army base about 10 miles from the DMZ in Korea, and for the first time in my life I saved up enough money to build a computer from modern parts instead of scavenging them from thrift stores and dumpsters. So I went AWOL for a day and went down to a place in Seoul called the Yongsan Electronics Market. To my young American mind, this was a place straight out of a William Gibson novel. Im…
Thing with Linux as much as I used it over the years, it's still no where near as compatible with weird hardware as windows. Windows just seems to be able to handle whatever hardware I've ever thrown at it.
Teenage me had no idea what to do with it. I didn't know how to compile a Linux kernel from source, at that point I'd barely started moving beyond Atmel AVRs and Java on LEGO Mindstorms.
"But can it run Linux?" 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, befo…