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Linux on a 486SX

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Re: Linux on a 486SX

#141

Post by bayindirh »

flyinghamster wrote: post #108
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.

Back in the day, I specifically chose an external serial (RS232, not USB) modem precisely to avoid Winmodems. I still have my V.92 Zoom somewhere, though I no longer even have a landline to use it. Somehow, I don't think anything fancier than 1200 bps would work over a VoIP connection, and even that would probably be unusable without error correction.

I think the frequency filters on the VOIP stack will kill all the communication.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#142

Post by octoberfranklin »

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.

This is what happens when you move all the manufacturing out of the country...

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#143

Post by outsidein »

tinus_hn wrote: post #52
outsidein wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HP Laserjet 2100 M (PCL and PostScript) is still running. Someone interested into the original PCL Language book which came with the printer?

Be aware that these old HP printers consume a rather large amount of energy no matter whether they are in use or in standby.

Sure. It is disconnected from power 99.9% of the time. I only fire it up when required. For convenience I used a dedicated external network print server (you know, the printer is centronics only, and centronics long ago vanished for thevsake of usb on PCs). This print server consumed about 10-20 watt, much more than the printer which was actually one of the first with power saving / standby.

The print server has been replaced by an usb-2-centronics dongle recently to reduce energy consumption further.

An about 25 year old laser printer running almost flawlessly mechanically, with latest MacOS and Windows 10 OS, supporting PCL6 and PS is a thing. He is on the 3rd toner cartridge (at least 5 years old).

Only needed for rare cases of government mandated written docs like passenger locator forms.

Paper transport has been unreliable almost from day 1 based on dried up rolls and paper.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#144

Post by knorker »

guenthert wrote: post #138
knorker wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> When, on what hardware?

That may have been later, thus with a bigger kernel, but on older hardware. It was probably 386 and 486s back in maybe 2.0/2.2 kernel era.

For the specific machines in question I set up some sort of RAID0 between two 60MB SCSI drives, to be able to do much.

The reason I say overnight may be because I had machines with specs like that a few years later than you. I did run Linux to some extent since 1994 (Slackware 2.0), but don't remember the kernel compiling aspects of back then at all.

But it's a good point. I was not comparing latest kernel to latest (or even necessarily median) kernel at the time.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#145

Post by anthk »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #114

Super neat! I went through the same process for some AM5x86-133 industrial computers with 32 MiB of RAM. I didn't think to change PHYSICAL_START or use musl. It's usually set at the 16 MiB mark so that the kernel doesn't consume any of the memory in the ISA DMA / ISA device zone. One thing I would recommend that I didn't see mentioned is switching to the SLOB allocator in the kernel. It's more space efficient than SL…

OpenWRT would be "easier", but you must find the kernel configs and CFLAGS for i486 by yourself.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#146

Post by hulitu »

ToddWBurgess wrote: post #23

My first Linux install was in 1994, on a 486DX/2-66 with 8MB of RAM. At the time it was considered standard hardware and Linux ran really well on it.

X was a little slow on my machine with the same config. But after i updated to 12MB RAM X with Fvwm2 was great.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#147

Post by morganvachon »

mattl wrote: post #26
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).

All of those booting on one machine?

Swapping hard drives, yes. Slackware boots on the original Windows 98 hard drive alongside Windows, and I have two other drives. One has BeOS 5.1, the other is my test drive I use to try out other OSes (NetBSD is on it right now if I remember correctly, but it hangs during boot sometimes). PATA laptop drives are getting scarce but I do have a PATA-SD adapter lying about that works in a few OSes and I have no shortage of SD cards due to my Raspberry Pi addiction.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#148

Post by morganvachon »

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, eLILO was made for this purpose. I still prefer it to GRUB, though EFISTUB is an option as well for those who don't want or need either, as long as your particular UEFI supports it.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#150

Post by nobleach »

hoistbypetard wrote: post #106
nobleach wrote: post #40

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…

You had better "salvage" options in 96 than I did. The Pentium 166 was newly released in 1996. 486SX33 was easy to come by in 96 for me, though, and it was easy to get slackware running on, too. Though I did let the smoke out of one monitor with a bad X modeline. I miss Dirt Cheap Drives.

You're right. The first machine I installed Linux on wasn't my own. It was a friend's Pentium, and he had partitioned a drive. It was 98/99 before I was regularly trying out distros from Cheapbytes, Linux Mall, etc. My dad's company closed their doors in 99/2000ish so that would have been when I was finding those Pentiums.
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