[HN Gopher] Linux on a 486SX
___________________________________________________________________
Linux on a 486SX
Author : marttt
Score : 187 points
Date : 2022-01-22 13:38 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ocawesome101.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (ocawesome101.github.io)
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| 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 SLUB or SLAB, but it is slower if you have a large
| amount of memory.
|
| The main problem I bumped into for minifying a modern Linux
| kernel is that so much of the modern Linux ecosystem (systemd,
| OpenRC, runit, etc.) expects a lot of the networking stack to be
| enabled, along with cgroups, namespaces, etc. In order to get a
| minimal Gentoo i486 image to boot, I needed to turn a lot of
| things on in the tinyconfig kernel. Admittedly, it's hard to
| image a Linux/Unix system without some form of networking :)
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| This is really nice. I once got a hold of an old Pentium when I
| had just started work and wanted to get Linux to work on it. It
| had 3.5" drives and no CD drive. I used
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux and got a basic system
| working without much hassle. I believe it even had a minimal X
| server running with twm or something. Enough to work on.
|
| I still maintain that after hardware ages a little, Linux (and
| perhaps other free operating systems and distros) are the only
| way to give a soul to the machine.
| readingnews wrote:
| Ah, those were the days. There is a long list of dmesg outputs
| from linux on many old systems, while not as old as the 486,
| there is an AMD K6/2... and sparcs!
|
| http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg_index.html
|
| The TRI-m in that list was a 486, although not modern linux.
| http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg/dmesg_machz.html
| Prolixium wrote:
| This post makes me want to roll my own Linux kernel again. I used
| to build vanilla kernels on Slackware (2.2.x!) and then Gentoo a
| /long/ time ago as well as modify stock Debian kernels to remove
| stuff I didn't need and tweak some knobs as of just a few years
| ago.
|
| 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.
| SigmundA wrote:
| My first job at computer store in high school I worked without
| pay initially just to get parts to build a 486-DX with it
| wonderful floating point unit so I could finally play Falcon 3.0
| properly.
|
| That same job taught me networking (Novell) and got me
| programming business apps in MS Access and the rest is history.
|
| Unfortunately I didn't get into Linux until much later.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| In ~2006 I was gifted a 486 desktop by my neighbour, it was a
| Mitac 486 running Windows 3.1 and DOS. It came with a matching
| VGA monitor. It had a floppy drive, 160MB hard disk and DIN
| keyboard. The mouse was fitted to a serial port. There was no
| sound card; sound was achieved by a driver that somehow bunged
| PCM through the PC speaker.
|
| Unfortunately it didn't survive a household clear out 3 years
| later, and that fills me with regret. Maybe I could've been
| trying my own projects on it now. I always liked the relative
| simplicity of the OS and hardware.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| With a certain nostalgia, I remember playing MIDs through the
| PC speaker back in the 286 days. From 5,25" floppy disks no
| less.
| nobleach wrote:
| 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 Shopper was 2 inches thick with a
| thousand ads for parts from places like Dirt Cheap Drives.
| mmastrac wrote:
| My homelab is still cobbled together like this. I bought a
| 10-year-old kvm, used switches, a used 1u server, etc.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| 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.
| 13of40 wrote:
| 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. Imagine a
| multi-storey sprawling mall covering about three blocks, with
| modern stores selling the latest LG stuff at the center, but in
| the alleys and passageways you might run into a pile of cases
| being scrapped, or an old man pulling a cart full of dead hard
| drives, or turn a corner and find someone hand building 20
| video cards on a plastic table. But I knew what I was there
| for, and I bought the parts for a 486DX4/100mhz, plus a used
| monitor and keyboard, and brought them back on the train.
| Somewhere I acquired a Slackware Linux CD, and when I got it
| all put together it was like a dream. I count that era as when
| CPUs got powerful enough that we just had extra processing
| power for the little details. But I digress. On the first night
| I had it, I decided to leave it running overnight and set up a
| cron job to wake me up for morning formation. Of course, it
| froze up in the middle of the night and I woke up late and got
| yelled at.
| bennysomething wrote:
| 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| 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.
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| 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.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| Fry's was the closest thing we had, and it was thinly
| spread at the best of times (particularly outside of
| California). It didn't really even make it into the
| pandemic; I remember walking into the Downers Grove, IL
| store in the Christmas 2019 season and feeling strange at
| how few cars there were in the parking lot. I walked in,
| and was shocked at the state of what was an obviously
| failing store that gave me the willies. I half-expected to
| run into zombies. Looking back, I'd have to call it a
| portent of 2020.
|
| 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.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| I visited silicon valley in the mid-nineties from
| Australia, Fry's was like a magical wonderland compared
| to the pathetic offerings we had. I went a little nuts
| and bought enough parts to build a machine just out of
| their bargain bins.
|
| I've often wondered why those places disappeared but then
| you remember nobody really builds PCs or other electronic
| stuff except as a hobby and most people are running
| laptops that can't be upgraded anyway.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| Shipping kills the deal, especially with used stuff that
| isn't worth much. An old workstation may cost $50 but the
| shipping is another $50 on top when you buy it on Ebay. At
| the same time, people are throwing out record amounts of
| ewaste that is higher-end than the gear I currently have on
| my desk. Really wish there was a local market here similar
| to those Asian ones.
| axiolite wrote:
| eBay is a far better source for electronic components than
| Amazon. You can source single switches. The cheapest are
| direct from China with 1mo shipping times, but there are US
| sellers as well.
| djur wrote:
| 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!
| h2odragon wrote:
| 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.
| InvaderFizz wrote:
| 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.
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| Commenting to save; this is prime advice right here.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| That Gotek looks like gold. I hadn't heard of it before.
| The CF-IDE and SCSI-SD are super useful on their own, but
| the Gotek looks like it works in some places that really
| lack for options.
| lost_soul wrote:
| 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.
| brian_herman wrote:
| There are easier ways to do this. https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-
| an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-...
| timbit42 wrote:
| That is mentioned and linked to in the article.
| [deleted]
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| 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.
| axiolite wrote:
| 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.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| I played this slimming-modern-linux-down game recently on a MIPS
| device. Getting it below 4MB is hard...too much cruft has
| accumulated in it.
| mysterydip wrote:
| 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.
| axiolite wrote:
| 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.
| saint_angels wrote:
| I think running a vintage DOS system is popular because there
| is a lot of DOS games. Linux doesn't have as much hardware/OS-
| dependent nostalgic software.
| rconti wrote:
| 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.)
| vidarh wrote:
| Yeah, 486's with 16MB RAM were our default X terminals at the
| time, and it worked quite well.
| fmakunbound wrote:
| > a 486DX/33, but with 4GB of RAM
|
| Wonder how long it took to sequentially scan 4GB of RAM
| tudorconstantin wrote:
| I think it was 4MB. I think there weren't too many 4GB HDDs
| back then
| factfindingisfn wrote:
| 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!
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| 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).
| AutumnMeowMeow wrote:
| 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.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| Another one of my silly retro computing projects:
| https://github.com/teknoman117/m68k-fpga-bridge. I wanted
| to try and make an MMU for it, hence the 68010 specifically
| (which added some additional data to the bus error
| exception to allow restarting the failed instruction).
|
| 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.
| AutumnMeowMeow wrote:
| These are so cool! :-)
|
| I like retrocomputing too, but more virtually:
| https://jexer.sourceforge.io/evolution.html
|
| I wanted to make a cycle-accurate 286 system once, just
| because it was such an interesting architecture.
| Protected mode, but 16 bit, and 16MB max RAM, but with
| segment:offset addressing. What's not to love about all
| of that?
| bshipp wrote:
| "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they
| could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
| zeeblazer wrote:
| A few tips! A floppy drive emulator you can load with usb is
| available now. Pretty sweet device for something like your
| project.
|
| The 36 pin connector on the sound card was probably a scsi cd-rom
| connector. They used to put them with the sound card :)
| pridkett wrote:
| 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 OS/2.
| rconti wrote:
| Even though I was installing from HDD (dual boot, as I recall),
| I had to download disksets at 14.4kbps. I remember setting a
| kitchen timer for 14 minutes for each ZModem xfer.
| timbit42 wrote:
| What wasn't real about OS/2 multitasking? It was pre-emptive,
| at least on a 386.
| supernovae wrote:
| os/2 was preemptive but had that single message queue so some
| people shrug it off - pretty common issue with computers
| prior to multi core systems.
|
| i ran a bbs on os2 and it was awesome. IBM sponsored my bbs
| as teamos2 and mustang software sent me wildcat! and i was
| the first bbs in houston to offer linux for download
| dopeboy wrote:
| 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.
| nousermane wrote:
| 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
| hulitu wrote:
| From some time X is a moving target. It's better if you can run
| XFree86 on old hardware.
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Perhaps this was addressed in the video, but I wonder if that
| tinkerer tried LILO? It is still supported and might fare
| better with old hardware.
| [deleted]
| morganvachon wrote:
| 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).
| xianwen wrote:
| Some modern laptops support only UEFI booting, when booting
| from internal hard drive. Does LILO/eLILO support UEFI
| booting?
| nousermane wrote:
| Yes. "e" in "eLILO" stands for "EFI".
|
| But then (U)EFI is an OS in itself, you can boot Linux
| directly from it, no bootloader needed:
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/EFISTUB
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > But then (U)EFI is an OS in itself
|
| Would it be accurate to describe (U)EFI as being like MS-
| DOS (i.e. single-tasking), but running in protected mode?
| larvaetron wrote:
| UEFI technically isn't single-tasking, it has a task
| scheduler.
| my123 wrote:
| Indeed, UEFI is the modern DOS.
| mattl wrote:
| All of those booting on one machine?
| anthk wrote:
| 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
| ToddWBurgess wrote:
| 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.
| fortran77 wrote:
| 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"
| gattilorenz wrote:
| > 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...
| fortran77 wrote:
| Windows 10 was never designed for a 486. Linux was.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| Windows NT was. That has about the same relationship to
| Windows 10 that the Linux kernels designed for 486 do to
| modern Linux.
| MailNerd wrote:
| It's amazing how few resources a Linux (or BSD) server requires.
| I have a twenty year old desktop machine (quality Fujitsu Siemens
| hardware but nothing unusal) reimaged as a storage/playground
| server and it's just fast enough. Can also handle some 18 TB
| storage.
| immmmmm wrote:
| makes me remember when i installed slackware 1.0 on the family's
| 386 when my dad bought a fresh 486dx. ah the joy of getting an X
| server running and recompiling kernel!!
| flyinghamster wrote:
| I have a couple of things from bygone Linux days: a retail copy
| of Red Hat 5.1 (pre-RHEL), and a 6-CD InfoMagic compilation. The
| latter was especially handy back before cable modems came to
| town. I recall downloading an earlier Slackware, one floppy image
| at a time, over 14.4K dialup when 14.4K was fast, and it still
| took forever.
|
| The InfoMagic discs:
|
| Disc 1: Slackware 3.0 and Debian 0.93R6
|
| Disc 2: Red Hat 3.0.3 for x86
|
| Disc 3: Archive of sunsite.unc.edu
|
| Disc 4: GNU source archive from prep.ai.mit.edu
|
| Disc 5: Archive of tsx-11.mit.edu
|
| Disc 6: Demos and Red Hat 2.1 for Alpha
| ben7799 wrote:
| I had a 486DX laptop that I ran Linux on from about 1995-1999, I
| probably tossed it around 2001 when the battery was pretty dead
| and the HDD was dying.
|
| In some ways that was some of the best times for Linux on the
| desktop in my experience. Windows and Mac were such an unreliable
| mess at that point that Linux seemed very competitive at the
| time. A lot of the advanced hardware integration in Win/Mac
| hadn't happened yet and Linux was very lean and mean and
| reliable. Both KDE and Gnome appeared in 1997 IIRC and the
| desktop was decent even if some apps weren't as good.
|
| My machine was 75mhz, 12MB RAM, 250mb HDD, 800x600 color LCD that
| had poor refresh. It got me through most of my college CS
| programming projects, though I eventually built a Linux tower
| too. X was good on that laptop the first few years but was really
| slow by 1998.
| 300bps wrote:
| I had a similar machine in 1996 running Slackware as a server
| for qmail.
|
| Hard not to be nostalgic over that time but things are so much
| better now. One command with AWS CLI and I can spin up a Linux
| box in 3 seconds today.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Sure, its great now if you want to get actual work done, but
| which is more fun?
| xattt wrote:
| There's opportunities to open up actual sheep farms if
| sheep shaving is your thing! :)
| wruza wrote:
| Yep, everyone had stock-ish pc components and then came
| winmodems, custom-protocol printers and other oem hardware.
| asveikau wrote:
| 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.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| 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.
| gregw2 wrote:
| 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. :)
| hulitu wrote:
| 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.
| deepspace wrote:
| 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.
| marttt wrote:
| > "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)"
| hulitu wrote:
| I find ftp more addictive. You could find interesting things
| back in the day (like DEC research papers).
| drittich wrote:
| Same, and I remember it was solid as a rock. Took a little
| while to get the Hayes modem working so it could act as dial-up
| ISP, but once I did, it never failed. I left it running
| headless in a server closet - I like to believe it's still
| running to this day.
| jggonz wrote:
| 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/itm/294597619526?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=...
| knorker wrote:
| 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 yeah they were built like tanks. Even the power switch felt
| like you were turning the power back on to the fences in
| Jurassic Park.
| outsidein wrote:
| 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.
| outsidein wrote:
| To add a fun story where Linux saved my live. Back in the 90'
| we had a Clipper / dBASE based DOS app used for capturing
| orders in a call center after TV commercials. In this case a
| prime TV show to generate donations. Full house with >100
| agents busy. Then the Novell Netware server crashed, and was
| unable to mount the disks.
|
| We managed to switch the users to an older server so they could
| continue to work. But it first seemed the HDD and files got
| corrupted and unrecoverable by disk tools from Netware. We
| thought of using a commercial recovery service, but this would
| cause delay and cost $$$$.
|
| So I removed the disks from Netware, fired up a Linux PC,
| connected the HDD to the Adaptec SCSI (Luckily install prior
| for a CD drive). The file system was not mountable, but
| something like dd /dev/sdb1 |strings ,,JJJJMMDD" discovered
| lots of salvage records.
|
| This literally saved my ass and the company.
| outsidein wrote:
| Last year I finally ditched some spare i386 CPU and memory
| modules (sort of 1, 2, 4 MByte) after getting no response on
| eBay.
| outsidein wrote:
| The HP Laserjet 2100 M (PCL and PostScript) is still running.
| Someone interested into the original PCL Language book which
| came with the printer?
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Be aware that these old HP printers consume a rather large
| amount of energy no matter whether they are in use or in
| standby.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| 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. And there was a
| DOS program called loadlinn that could boot into Linux from
| DOS. So I first installed Slackware using UMSDOS onto the DOS
| partition on my mother's PC, then transferred the linux
| directory tree from her PC to my laptop. I don't remember if I
| did that transfer using floppies or a null modem cable. Finally
| I removed the linux directory from my mother's PC. I did all of
| this while the rest of my family was away from home, so they
| never knew.
|
| I later learned that I could add "floppy=thinkpad" to the
| kernel command line to enable support for the floppy drive in
| my ThinkPad model. Then I got brave and resized my DOS
| partition, using one of the free DOS-based partitioning tools
| available at the time, so I could have a real Linux filesystem.
| the_grue wrote:
| I went that route on a school PC in 1998. There was no floppy
| drive, so I installed a Linux distro (also Slackware, iirc)
| onto the Windows partition, then resized the Windows
| partition with Partition Magic and used the existing Linux as
| a bootstrap for a fresh install on its own partition. It was
| so incredibly magical. No one had any idea I was doing it,
| and I felt part of the hacker culture :) I tinkered with it
| for a few of months at least, and eventually was compiling my
| own kernels, playing with boot/swap partitions, etc. Never
| got X to work, though.
| j_m_b wrote:
| I also ran Slackware on a 486DX. I remember it taking hours to
| compile a kernel. I upgraded around 98' to a Pentium II and was
| blown away when I could compile a kernel in 2 minutes!
| rconti wrote:
| Yep, I clearly remember it took just about 8 hours to compile
| a kernel on a 486 with 4MB of RAM. Upgrading to 16GB was a
| $400 proposition at the time, but when I finally got new
| hardware, I was shocked to realize this whole kernel-
| compiling thing was supposed to take minutes.
| dcminter wrote:
| About the same era I was working on my industry year at a UK
| computer company. I was mostly working with the spiffy new
| Pentiums, but had a spare 486 machine to play with Linux. The
| complete SLS (I think, though it may have been Slackware)
| fitted nicely onto a box of 3.5" disks (50 in total?)
|
| Downloading it was a nightmare though - there was no TCP/IP
| connection available to me, but I _could_ use the X.25 based
| email package. Attachments weren 't an option, but you could
| send email to a file hosting server (funet.fi perhaps?) and it
| would split the requested file into as many 64K UUEncoded
| emails as necessary in response. Reassembling them (given the
| clunky email software I was working with) was a distressingly
| manual process... but I eventually collated and copied the
| complete set of disk images to floppy and installed them on the
| lavish 100Mb drive of the 486.
|
| I also recall the fun (?) of trying to get the right monitor
| sync info for the XConfig file, and the superstition of `sync;
| sync; sync` that must have been long out-dated by the time I
| actually got my hands on this machine (though I did play around
| a little with the boot/root disk combination before that).
|
| I sometimes feel a pang of nostalgia for all that stuff, but
| you can take my 1Gb network connection, hidpi monitor, and
| multi-terrabyte SSDs out of my cold dead hands!
|
| Edit: Afterthought to give a little extra perspective on when
| this was: Around the same time I signed up for a Beta program
| on some Microsoft projects and boxed copies (with manuals) of
| "Daytona" and "Chicago" turned up in the post!
| alrs wrote:
| I still sync; sync; sync.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386, but
| because the kernel is a non-modular spaghetti-code mess, they had
| to deprecate 386 support to fix something else. It's only a
| matter of time before 486 is gone too.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I thought the lack of the CMPXCHG instruction was what
| initially caused Linux to drop 386 support.
| zokula wrote:
| gattilorenz wrote:
| > because the kernel is a non-modular spaghetti-code mess,
|
| Laughs in Tanenbaum
| chasil wrote:
| I have an old Am586 in a drawer that I could send this guy. At
| least he would have a math coprocessor.
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I really wish I didn't give away the Dell 316LT I came across a
| number of years ago (~2008?) at a swap meet. I had the whole kit
| - 386SX16, 8 MB of RAM, extra screens, the manuals, an external
| 5.25" drive, and all the diagnostic disks. But, my parents were
| moving us from a large house in Alabama to a small apartment in
| California and we didn't have the space for most of my parts (
| _cough_ e-waste _cough_ ) collection.
|
| Teenage me had no idea what to do with it. I didn't know how to
| compile a Linux kernel from source, at that point I'd barely
| started moving beyond Atmel AVRs and Java on LEGO Mindstorms.
| rasengan wrote:
| 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.
| vidarh wrote:
| A 486 can handle X just fine. 486's were our main X11 desktop
| machines at the office in the mid 90's (it has been the year of
| Linux on the desktop for me since 1995). The challenge is more
| that most modern X clients won't play well with a slow, memory
| constrained machine.
| sobkas wrote:
| > A 486 can handle X just fine. 486's were our main X11
| desktop machines at the office in the mid 90's (it has been
| the year of Linux on the desktop for me since 1995). The
| challenge is more that most modern X clients won't play well
| with a slow, memory constrained machine.
|
| I remember when X switched from monolithic server to modular
| one. I had to buy new GPU because S3 I had wasn't supported.
| I have bought ATI.
| anthk wrote:
| With SVGALib and now framebuffer you can run image and PDF
| viewers. Videos, well, maybe from a Pentium and up with MPEG
| movies.
| chalst wrote:
| 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.
| frampytown wrote:
| 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 :-)
| zozbot234 wrote:
| 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.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| NetBSD still works on early 1980's VAXes.
| vbernat wrote:
| 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).
| chalst wrote:
| 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
| hulitu wrote:
| As far as i know slackware will not boot on a 486 since
| some time (14.0 ?) because the kernel or glibc is compiled
| using instructions for later processors.
| jcurbo wrote:
| "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, before RHEL). And before that probably Slackware on
| floppies. I eventually got an AMD K6-2 which ran a lot faster...
|
| Of course, this article is about running modern Linux, but Debian
| Slink is still there to download and install and I'm sure it
| works just peachy.
|
| The section on configuring the kernel really gives me nostalgia
| as I used to build my own kernels back then, something I haven't
| done in years.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Ah, the good ol' ping of death days.
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