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Linux on a 486SX

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Re: Linux on a 486SX

#91

Post by dopeboy »

pridkett wrote: post #22

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…

The paper book you had reminds me of the very thick stack of printed papers that is the Gentoo installation guide circa 2005. It was my first foray into Linux and I, for macho reasons, went with Gentoo.

I think I gave up after a day, tried Fedora, and settled on Ubuntu.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#92

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

spookthesunset wrote: post #63
13of40 wrote: post #56

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.

We used to have a monthly computer show and sale in the DC area. It was like this but in tents at the fair grounds. It was heaven. What an incredible time to come of age alongside modern technology coming of age. I still have bins of computer bits just in case. Like 3.5”IDE to 2.5”IDE ribbon cable adaptors and shit like that.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#93

Post by DrAwdeOccarim »

InvaderFizz wrote: post #57
h2odragon wrote: post #27

IDE -> 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.

There are three tools useful on machines of this era: 1. The aforementioned IDE/CF adapter. It helps that it's a dumb PCB since CF speaks IDE natively. 2. A Gotek Floppy Emulator (With the FlashFloppy firmware) 3. A SCSI2SD SCSI emulator.

Commenting to save; this is prime advice right here.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#94

Post by djur »

Wow, this is exactly the same type of computer (all-in-one Compaq Presario 486) that I first installed Linux on. Slackware 3.x, if I recall correctly, disk images downloaded at 14.4kbps and loaded onto every spare floppy I could find. I don't think I even got X11 going because that was a lot more disks!

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#95

Post by lost_soul »

Linux taught me about computers and it taught me about politics. I worked at a university where the demand for Internet far exceeded the capabilities of the network. While a filtering bridge may reduce broadcast storms to an acceptable level, it also permitted the administration to delay much needed upgrades.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#96

Post by axiolite »

UncleSlacky wrote: post #59

I did something similar with a Compaq Contura 4/25c about 15-20 years ago. It had 8 Mb RAM so I was able to install Slackware 3.9 (IIRC) via floppies with a standalone X session running Netscape. Later I put Win 95c on it (again, via floppies) which ran fairly well.

I still have my Contura in a box in a closet. Along with a PCMCIA network card, the docking station and the 20MB RAM upgrade. Used it up until ~2010 when I got a similarly tiny and inexpensive EeePC. Was a nice small, cheap system that worked well enough as a dumb serial/telnet/ssh terminal for network management tasks. It was only a little bit slow to start an SSH session. Even started up fast with Linux or FreeBSD. OpenBSD was rather slow to boot.

I didn't have much reason to bother with X11. Text utilities always got the job done, including for web browsing needs thanks to links.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#97

Post by anthk »

rasengan wrote: post #15

I ran Linux on a 486 DX for quite some time including providing shells to people on IRC. Don't run X and it's more than powerful enough.

With SVGALib and now framebuffer you can run image and PDF viewers. Videos, well, maybe from a Pentium and up with MPEG movies.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#98

Post by zozbot234 »

frampytown wrote: post #89
chalst wrote: post #16

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.

It's more about whether the kernel retains support for 486. I wonder how many people are still using the platform actively? Or is it just hobbyists at this stage. If no-one is using it I think the kernel devs would drop support. Though perhaps Linus has a soft spot for old x86s specifically :-)

AIUI, the Linux kernel only dropped 386 because it was getting unworkable to maintain the SMP code for it. Perhaps support could be reintroduced, limited to single-core machines (no SMP support in the kernel configuration) only. Of course it would mostly be useful as a proof of concept, but the 386 is a very well-understood architecture nowadays so that would definitely have some merit.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#99

Post by fortran77 »

gattilorenz wrote: post #55
fortran77 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when Linux finally got "good enough" in the early 90s and I switched from SCO Xenix and SCO Unix to Linux. Many people ran Linux on 486 machines. Other than the nostalgia of seeing the old boot loaders and boot screens, there's nothing special about this "feat"

> Many people ran Linux on 486 machines. Other than the nostalgia of seeing the old boot loaders and boot screens, there's nothing special about this "feat" Many people ran Windows on 486. But it was Windows 3.x, or 95 at most. If you managed to get Windows 10 to boot on one, surely that would be a feat...

Windows 10 was never designed for a 486. Linux was.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#100

Post by vidarh »

rconti wrote: post #68

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.)

Yeah, 486's with 16MB RAM were our default X terminals at the time, and it worked quite well.
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