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Linux on a 486SX

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Re: Linux on a 486SX

#131

Post by asveikau »

int_19h wrote: post #128
asveikau wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The safest bet was to use external serial modems. Which usually meant Zyxel or USR, hence $$$. I remember having to settle on 28.8k USR Sportster (as opposed to the then already-common 33.6k - USR wouldn't fit the budget then).

I'm having flashbacks. Then USR merged with 3com and that was tricky because 3com sold some winmodems?

Google images on those external ones from USR took me back a bit though. I didn't have one of those but I saw them.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#132

Post by asveikau »

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…

This comment is very dense with things I used but haven't thought about in 20+ years.

Loadlin.exe wasn't even a terrible solution for dual boot with win9x... I may have even scripted a boot menu in autoexec.bat at some point.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#133

Post by themadturk »

jcurbo wrote: post #38

"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…

I ran a 486 as an internal web server in the law office I worked at in the early 2000s. Don't remember any of the system details, but it ran very nicely until at least 2006.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#134

Post by DarylZero »

cesarb wrote: post #121
bennysomething wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Cron job story made me laugh :) 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.

> Windows just seems to be able to handle whatever hardware I've ever thrown at it. Other than the very first few versions of Windows, the true reality is most probably the opposite: whatever hardware you've thrown at it is able to handle Windows. That is, both the hardware and its software (driver, firmware) have been designed for and tested with Windows.

Linux runs on way more hardware than Windows. How many machines did Apple make before they could run Windows?

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#135

Post by boondaburrah »

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.

For me it was the MIT swapfest[0], every 3rd sunday of the month april-october. I don't know what happened to it since the pandemic & also I moved out of the area, but it was amazing for getting fantastic little odds&ends and components. Since it grew out of ham radio, it generally had parts and tools you needed for fixing electronics.

[0] http://w1mx.mit.edu/flea-at-mit/

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#136

Post by accrual »

blueflow wrote: post #125
accrual wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compact Flash cards are indeed pretty useful in old PCs. One just needs to be careful to buy the "industrial" variants that present themselves as a fixed disk to the system. Some operating systems won't install to common consumer CF cards believing them to be removable disks. A handy tool for booting from CD-ROM is Plop Boot Manager. It installs itself into the boot sector and can manage booting from the disk, CD dri…

This sounds wrong. How can a CF card be recognized as "removable"? Do CF cards exist that support ATAPI?

CF cards can operate in three modes: memory mode, PC Card/IO mode, and IDE/fixed disk mode. Since CF cards were originally a type of portable storage for cameras, etc., it makes sense for them to be treated as removable devices. One would plug it into a computer, download the files, then eject the card. The OS would like to know its removable so it can make any writes immediately and not buffer or cache them like it might do for a fixed disk.

Some cards, usually marketed as "industrial", support a fixed disk mode. This one for example can be set to fixed disk by grounding pin 9 (output enable):

[PDF] https://resources.winsystems.com/datasheets/cflash-g-xxxm-i-...

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#137

Post by cmrdporcupine »

My first x86 machine (after running a 68000 Atari ST for years before) was a 486DX50 and I ran the first versions of Linux (pre-ELF), 1993ish, installing off floppy, downloaded via 9600 baud modem. Dual booted with Windows 3.1 and DOS.

It's nice to see recent kernel versions can still work fairly well on this hardware. I don't recall my boot times being as long as 50s though. But who knows, it was a different time and expectations were different. I had 8MB RAM and a 200MB drive and while there was swapping, I was able to run X11, emacs, Mosaic (and then Netscape), and some terminals without serious problems.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#138

Post by guenthert »

knorker wrote: post #47
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 y…

> I may misremember.

Yeah, I think you do.

> Compiling the kernel was basically an overnight operation, IIRC.

When, on what hardware?

Who was it who complained that compiling the Linux kernel took always ten minutes, regardless of hardware generation? (which of course, isn't entirely true: https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-linux-kernel)

For me, on my 386DX 24Mhz with 8MiB RAM, it took about 20minutes late 92 or early 93 (SLS 1.0 -- pre 1.0 kernel), but I had to leave X11, as otherwise the machine would swap to death.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#139

Post by marttt »

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.

+1, this has been keeping my old Thinkpad T42 running in silence for years. Great write-up about testing different CF cards on a Thinkpad X40 in 2013: https://www.daniel-boehmer.de/thinkpad-cf/

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#140

Post by bayindirh »

asveikau wrote: post #131
int_19h wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The safest bet was to use external serial modems. Which usually meant Zyxel or USR, hence $$$. I remember having to settle on 28.8k USR Sportster (as opposed to the then already-common 33.6k - USR wouldn't fit the budget then).

I'm having flashbacks. Then USR merged with 3com and that was tricky because 3com sold some winmodems? Google images on those external ones from USR took me back a bit though. I didn't have one of those but I saw them.

I had a USR 56K V90 non-voice external modem. That thing was reliable as a tank. Never powered off, never dropped when connected. Remember guessing the download speed by looking at the blinking speed of lights on it.
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