101–110 of 151 posts
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.
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Most distributions already don't support a 486 anymore. For example, Debian dropped support for Pentium with Stretch (2017). And support for 486 was dropped in Jessie (2015). 386 support was dropped with Sarge (2005).
Slackware still does, but I think it's the last distribution to do so that still deserves to be called major. http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php
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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.
Between the implosion of Fry's, and Radio Shack not quite lasting long enough to capitalize on the maker movement, it's pretty well online ordering or nothing.
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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.
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I get real nervous about posting personal retrocomputing projects here to be honest :) I just spent most of my free time in the last week trying to get the Rust compiler to run on a K6-2/500. Had a bunch of trouble because one of the newer x86 extensions (CET) chose opcodes which decode as NOPs, and therefore are considered safe to include in binaries for older processors. Unfortunately, they're only NOPs on i686 or…
This is really cool, even if you didn't post I'm glad you mentioned it in a comment. :) I remember compiling Linux kernel on my Cyrix 486SX 25MHz (the one with a disabled-by-default L1 cache!) and it took an hour. Got it on a P60 and it was like 5 minutes. Good times.
I also managed to get someone on utsource to sell me a tray of 386EX33s for like $2 a pop so eventually I can make some 386 systems. I managed to track down a few of the old IIT 3C87 FPUs that had the hardware matrix by vector multiply so I'm going to try to make some 3D renderer if I ever get around to putting it together.
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…
I miss Dirt Cheap Drives.
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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.
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Yep, everyone had stock-ish pc components and then came winmodems, custom-protocol printers and other oem hardware.
I was reading a bunch of these comments thinking "winmodems were terrible". Thanks for that. I remember carefully selecting modems. Most of the PCI modems in popular retail shops were winmodems so getting one that used the ISA bus was the first step. But even that was not the safest bet. Online shopping was nothing like it is today, so getting a known good model was more difficult.
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> 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.
I feel like it's almost required to page through the various dialogs in menuconfig periodically in order to stay current when it comes to modern hardware and how it can interact with the OS.