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Linux on a 486SX

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Re: Linux on a 486SX

#81

Post by hulitu »

gregw2 wrote: post #33

Dating myself here ... I ran Linux on my 386SX black and white LCD laptop (including X windows!) back in the early Slackware days 1992-1994. It was easier to do that back then than now... :) Oh,and a grad student friend of mine warned me in 93... "That Web stuff is addictive"... so I avoided it for another 3-6 months and stuck to FTP sites and a bit of gopher/WAIS. :)

Running X in 8 bits with colormap switching was fun. Now everything is 24 bits. Fractint was much cooler in 8 bits ( color cycling). Now obtaining a fractal with a limited number of distinct colors is a challenge.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#82

Post by hulitu »

marttt wrote: post #48
gregw2 wrote: post #33

Dating myself here ... I ran Linux on my 386SX black and white LCD laptop (including X windows!) back in the early Slackware days 1992-1994. It was easier to do that back then than now... :) Oh,and a grad student friend of mine warned me in 93... "That Web stuff is addictive"... so I avoided it for another 3-6 months and stuck to FTP sites and a bit of gopher/WAIS. :)

> "That Web stuff is addictive" Prophetic declaration of the day. I'm envisioning a great hacker t-shirt: "That Web stuff is addictive... stick to FTP (a friend, 1993)"

I find ftp more addictive. You could find interesting things back in the day (like DEC research papers).

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#83

Post by hulitu »

nousermane wrote: post #3

Few months ago, somebody did a series of live streaming events on bringing up a 486-based tablet PC (which happened to be an old voting machine) with modern linux. Kernel turned out to be the easy part. Booting grub from BIOS that doesn't support LBA addressing (CHS only) - a bit harder. Running X11 on hardware without PCI - ridiculously hard: https://diode.zone/w/kMhja4oBUvP6CScsiDZP38

From some time X is a moving target. It's better if you can run XFree86 on old hardware.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#84

Post by chalst »

vbernat wrote: post #66
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.

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

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#85

Post by axiolite »

mysterydip wrote: post #2

Awesome and thanks for documenting the process! There's large DOS communities with people running vintage hardware, but not much I know of for linux.

With DOS, there are lots of reasons you'd NEED to run an ancient OS on ancient hardware. Of course emulation provides some more options...

With Linux, you can just keep your ancient programs and hardware running on modern systems.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#86

Post by deepspace »

gregw2 wrote: post #33

Dating myself here ... I ran Linux on my 386SX black and white LCD laptop (including X windows!) back in the early Slackware days 1992-1994. It was easier to do that back then than now... :) Oh,and a grad student friend of mine warned me in 93... "That Web stuff is addictive"... so I avoided it for another 3-6 months and stuck to FTP sites and a bit of gopher/WAIS. :)

I set up a SLIP (later replaced by PPP) gateway on a 386SX running Slackware, connected to a 14K4 modem back in 1993. It served as our company's main internet gateway until late 1995.

The title of this post really had me do a double-take. "Of course Linux can run on a 486, it's fine on a 386". Just need the right version.

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#87

Post by Teknoman117 »

factfindingisfn wrote: post #21

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 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 newer, and the K6s are i586 processors. It was mind-numbing because even if you explicitly tell the compiler to output/optimize for a K6-2 or Pentium (-march=k6-2 or -march=pentium) it's still outputting the CET opcodes. You have to pass -fcf-protection=none for them to go away. Super annoying.

Benchmarking it was pretty funny, because compiling one of my personal Rust projects is about 500 times slower than my TR 1950X desktop. Compiles in 7.5 seconds on the Threadripper but takes 67 minutes on the K6-2/500. So much progress in 18 years (K6-2/500 in 1999 -> TR 1950X (4 GHz) in 2017).

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#88

Post by anthk »

nousermane wrote: post #3

Few months ago, somebody did a series of live streaming events on bringing up a 486-based tablet PC (which happened to be an old voting machine) with modern linux. Kernel turned out to be the easy part. Booting grub from BIOS that doesn't support LBA addressing (CHS only) - a bit harder. Running X11 on hardware without PCI - ridiculously hard: https://diode.zone/w/kMhja4oBUvP6CScsiDZP38

Try Delicate Linux. Compile Libressl, then install it at /opt/libressl and recompile Lynx against libressl with

    CFLAGS="-I/opt/libressl/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/libressl/lib" ./configure; make; sudo make install.
Try gopher://hngopher.com first and later, https://news.ycombinator.com

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#89

Post by frampytown »

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 :-)

Re: Linux on a 486SX

#90

Post by AutumnMeowMeow »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #87
factfindingisfn wrote: post #21

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 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.

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