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Installing Linux On Old Hardware?
cptdondo writes "I've got an old laptop that I've been trying to resurrect. It has a 486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM, a 720 MB HD, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 640x480 VESA video. It does not have a CD drive, USB port, or a network port. It has PCMCIA, and I have a network card for that. My goal is to get a minimal GUI that lets me run a basic browser like Dillo and open a couple of xterms. I've spent the last few days trying to find a Linux distro that will work on that machine. I've done a lot of work on OpenWRT, so naturally I though that would work, but X appears to be broken in the recent builds — I can't get the keyboard to work. (OK, not surprising; OpenWRT is made to run on WiFi Access Point hardware which doesn't have a keyboard...) All of the 'mini' distros come as a live CD; useless on a machine without a CD-ROM. Ditto for the USB images. I'm also finding that the definition of a 'mini' distro has gotten to the point of 'It fits on a 3GB partition and needs 128 MB RAM to run.' Has Linux really become that bloated? Do we really need 2.2 GB of cruft to bring up a simple X session? Is there a distro that provides direct ext2 images instead of live CDs?"
Find a distro from the same era. Redhat 2.1 (and I'm not talking redhat enterprise 2.1) circa 1995 will install and give you an X environment. Maybe even good old 3.03 would fit the bill.
Time to get rid of that hardware, or dump it in your own personal museum...
You'll be looking at older distros. I certainly had X running on that kind of hardware back in the day through Slackware, and all its versions can still. We're talking a machine from the mid-1990s, so you'd be looking at Slackware 3 or 4 or something like that. You could try the older versions of Debian if they're still around, too.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It may be too limited, but would Damn Small LInux http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ > be sufficient?
Rule linux can do what your asking. Or at least it would the last time I tried it. These days it's based on Fedora Core 7
http://rule-project.org/ Puppy Linux may also fit the bill http://www.puppylinux.org/
There's always DSL. It's 50mb and uses an older kernel. I used it on a laptop with no USB booting and 64mb ram, but I did have a detachable CD drive.
I can attest to BasicLinux on old hardware like yours, at 2 Floppys worth of space, X and Links pre-iinstalled http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/baslinux/
Are you seriously saying you can't find a minimal distro that boots off a floppy? You'll probably need to dig up something from when your laptop was current (maybe slackware?) and then build it up a bit from there, but it's certainly doable. It may not be the most recent kernel or have the latest features, but you'll need to look a little harder.
A Trove of these things:
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/
Promising:
http://atomic.eyedropvideo.com/remote1.shtml
Non-X woth graphical browsing:
http://blueflops.sourceforge.net/
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I used this quite a bit in the old days. http://www.micheleandreoli.it/mulinux/
Might be good to check out http://www.puppylinux.org/
If you're lucky and can actually find it , QNX had a whole distro on a floppy. :)
It was intended as a demo , but had full features like file browsing and some net.
That might be able to boot the machine. But frankly , i know of no other distro
still able to boot and install via a floppy.This will prove interresting to follow.
Im just as eager to find out as you
Happy hacking
Older versions of Debian supported floppy installs. The last time I tried it (with etch I think) I had some issues that annoyed me and the response I got is that nobody on the dev. team wanted to suffer with a kernel image that doesn't have the kitchen sink loaded so they crippled/dropped floppy install support. Still once you have an older system running it is trivial to upgrade if you have some connectivity.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
1. Install Ubuntu
2. ????
3. Profit!!!
Also try Tiny Core http://www.tinycorelinux.com/
Have you tried Damn Small Linux It sounds like exactly what you want. It will run on a 486 with 16MB of RAM, and 50MB harddrive. It runs X, Dillo is included, and has several install methods available, not just live disks.
Use Voyage Linux!
It's a stripped down Debian that's designed to run on embedded devices, and run entirely in RAM. It keeps Debian's APT package manager for super easy installation. Only 128MB or disk space (tiny base install) required for the base install. I use this distro on my PC Engines Alix board for a audiophile USB music server.
In regards yo getting it installed, you can either take out the HD and do the install on another machine or beg-borrow/steal a PCMCIA USB adapter.
If you use X, I would recommend a super lightweight window manager like Openbox, or better yet Awesome. You should also check out dvtm; 'tis a console tiling manager. Cool, eh?
Get an account, and start with the basics.
1. Tweak
2. Testdrive
3. Tweak
4. Testdrive
5. Download
6. Hook up your Backpack parallel port CDROM drive, and go to sleep while it installs.
7. Profit!!1
Personally, I'm biased towards Debian so I'd recommend DSL. It even has a gui, if you want one! ^_^
The only issue I see is you have to make the floppy disks version from an ISO since it is not distributed standard as a floppy disk set.
Here is a tutorial to get DSL installed with floppy disks: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/install_from_floppy.html
I have an ancient Toshiba satellite running a pretty current version of desktop-BSD. Full graphical desktop extremely small footprint etc...
a 486? Why on earth would you bother? Even a p3 laptop is pretty obsolete these days, but still can be had for under 30 or 40 dollars on craigslist. That would be a quantum leap above the 486 you are planning on using.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Damn Small Linux and Tiny Core Linux being some of the obvious choices. Your real problem is getting things booted in the first place. I wonder whether gPXE is able to see your PCMCIA network card. If it did, you could just boot that off of a floppy and from there it would be a pretty simple task to netinstatll something; if not, well I'm pretty sure DSL has a set of floppies still. You could also try installing Slackware 9, which I think was the last version to ship a floppy set -- just install the very base system from there and then once you're booted you can try an in-place upgrade over the network.
Distrowatch has an entire category for "Old Hardware" which yields the options of: Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, Tiny Core Linux, and other options.
lr2nsearch.
Slackware 7.1 would probably support that old lappy... I used to swear by it back in the day. The only issue you may have is the NIC. Make sure, though, to put on some sort of lightweight WM, like blackbox or flvwm(95). KDE was the system default for the 7.x series, and was a bit of a hog, FYI. (To this day, the closest to a heavyweight WM/DE I will use is xfce4...) Good luck! Also, let us all know what you end up putting on the old girl... --Stak
Holy happy hippy crap!
I barely got passed "486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM" when this obvious question popped into my mind: WHY WOULD YOU EVER CONSIDER INSTALLING ANYTHING ON THIS HARDWARE? Throw it out the window and visit the local flee-markets. You can get something as new Pentium3-based laptops for the price of a cup of coffee there these days. Better laptops also tend to lie in piles on recycling points, perhaps you can grab a few better laptops if you go deliver yours there. Perhaps you have some special loving relationship to this hardware, if so then put it in a frame or something and install GNU/Linux on something else. Seriously. That hardware is just not worth the time and trouble unless you are making a museum exhibit of some kind. I realize that this does not help with your original question, I just felt compelled to point out the obvious.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Fd Linux was a pretty popular distro back in the day (cira ~2000) when floppy drives still thrived on sub-pentium machines. This was big competition against others like ZipSlack (Slackware on a ZIP disk) an LOAF (Linux On A Floppy) or muLinux. I really liked Fd Linux. I think development has tailored down quite a bit in the last 3/4 of a decade. However, this has all the console love one would need... it comes equipped with 'lynx' and a like. Hell it's even got limited hardware support for wifi (802.11b)... pretty sweet stuff on 1.44mb that's for sure.
I have a similar laptop, although mine only has 16 MB or RAM. I've got a better processor, though. Anyway, I see several people have suggested run a distro from that era. Indeed that works--sort of. My old laptop runs fine with a Redhat from that era, or a Slackware (or whatever Windows it came with, for that matter).
The reason I say it works "sort of" is that if you just run a distro from that era, you have a browser of that era. I had hoped to use my old laptop as basically a terminal for configuring routers and other things like that which have web interfaces.
The problem is, all my routers have web interfaces that assume browser features that are too new for that era. I was not able to find a browser that was new enough to actually work with my typical consumer home router and still run acceptably on the old system. I think I got Konqueror to work once--but it took something like an hour for it to start.
I think the browser is going to be the determining factor as to whether or not this is feasible for you.
...and install Debian. Install only the base system: select no "tasks". Then put the drive back in the old machine, configure the network, and install what you need.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Your "bloat" is my awesome new functionality. And Linux runs just great on tons of crappy embedded devices; even the submitter mentions OpenWRT. The problem isn't that Linux can't fill the niche in question, it's that nobody fucking cares enough to do it. Ancient hardware is stupidly inefficient and should be recycled, not used.
and core and Linux oh my
486MHz? You mean an Intel 486?
After getting Debian running on an old Desktop system, I can say it does work, but you're guaranteed to hit speed bumps along the way.
A lot of posts here claim that Linux now a days is bloated, has too many lines of code, too many dependencies, requires too many resources, bla bla bla... These posts conclude that an older linux distro is necessary. But what about the various embedded systems that have even slimmer resources than what we have here, and run Linux fine? It may be that most distros now a days are meant for new hardware and the kernel defaults to more demanding settings. But all of this can be tweaked and customized at ease. Play with Gentoo. If this doesn't fare well, investigate Linux distros for embedded systems.
ZX2C4
OpenBSD does all I need on the command line and X, plus there are many of the recent packages you may want. I have OpenBSD working great on my old Libretto 100ct without having to compromise with old, insecure Linux distros.
Win95. I believe that the original install CD had a utility to create floppies for a full install. Do that on your main machine, install Win95 on the laptop, then download what you need. I know it sounds stupid, but I'm guessing that Win95 will recognize all of your hardware and actually get you on line faster than trying to sort out the linux drivers for the hardware. Then do a dual boot install and keep Win95 until you get the linux install hashed out - it will beat downloading stuff on your main machine and then copying it to floppies.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
You're using hardware that is close to twenty years old. I don't think it's fair to say that because linux has kept up with current technologies (CD-ROMs and USB drives) that it has become bloated. Some other people have pointed out, correctly, that you should be looking for distros from the era if you expect it to install easily on your hardware.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
Seriously, why? If your goal is to run dillo and a couple of xterms, pick up an old p3 laptop. People are throwing them away. If you want to do it as a "fun" project, why Ask Slashdot? Is not half the fun in figuring it out?
As someone who used to run linux on a 486 (and a 386), I can tell you that you aren't going to do any usable web browsing in X in 28megs of ram. Those are lynx specs.
You can actually do some interesting/useful things in linux with that hardware, but graphical web browsing isn't going to be one of them. Unless maybe you restrict yourself to Craigslist.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
Try Slackware 10. Install only the base system and add packages from CD as you need them.
Keep track of what you install and maintain a tags file to automate future installations.
...when you can get P3 class machines or better for free that will be an order of magnitude faster. For anything under $100, the principle concern should be power usage, since if left on 24x7, that will be far more expensive than purchasing the system itself.
Please help metamoderate.
Throw MS-DOS and LoopyNES on it. Get some decent NES gaming running on that thing.
No$GMB also works at that kind of slow speed.
You don't mention if a floppy is accessible, but if it is, here you go. DSL is just about the most minimal functioning distro I have found. Of course there is always slack, but you'll have to go a few versions back to install using floppies and network. And there's always a way to get usb but I doubt you'd be able to boot from it...
Shift happens. Fire it up.
I know most of the /. crowd is not Gentoo friendly, we even have a Gentoo meme :)
But seriously.. You can use emerge, with portage et all, to build a small and optimized/dedicated Gentoo based distribution for that laptop. You don't even need to put portage on the laptop, just use emerge on somewhere else to build packages for it. Emerge will take care of cross-compiling, etc..
As simple as I can put it, think on it as a Box with a repository-toolchain capable of building packages for *other* Box, while still keeping track of package updates and dependencies.
NOTE: A "full install" of Gentoo is not required for building gentoo based distros, you can setup a Gentoo chroot (you only want portage and emerge afterall, don't you?) on your debian/fedora/whetever box, or even setup a Gentoo prefix on MacOSX.
I would go with an older slackware and then upgrade to the newest once you have the net running,the whole problem in your case is the lack of pcmcia support in gPXE, if you have access to a docking station with a isa,pci bus you might beable to use gPXE and start directly into a new distribution. Alternativ is just remove the harddrive from the box and installed it on another box and then move it back, works too.
for workgroups
Debian 3.0 "Woody" worked for me on DebiaNiKa, a P100 with 16 megs of RAM and 2gb disk usage. It did X with IceWM (looking like Win95) and Dillo, and I even used it as a dial-up router + Apache/PHP server not that far ago. It even had an DIY AJAX interfase for incoming/outgoing byte statistics for the dial up connection. Before that I had tried RedHat 6.1 on that machine. And before THAT, around 2002, I had installed SuSE 7.0 on a 486 using LVM over two hard disks sized 200Mb and 160Mb respectively (yeah, I do mean 1E+6 bytes). So the distros I tried and likely work with your hardware are: SuSE 7.0, Red Hat 6.1, Debian 3.0.
I haven't tried this myself, but I can't imagine a minimal install would be too big. I have installed various versions of BSD using a boot floppy and network installation, and it was always pretty painless. (An old laptop comes to mind, though I can't remember whether it was 386/486-class or not - at most it was a pentium 90.) I'd be more concerned about getting any gui running well in just 28mb of ram, though. Only thing I've seen 'snappy' with that little ram would be the floppy demo of QNX, if you could find it. But it ain't linux, either.
I'm not sure anymore, but I know older versions of Mandriva (Well, Mandrake - try to find 9.2 or earlier) could boot from a floppy and install over the network. I installed directly from a mirror a couple times back in the day. Worth looking into. I believe carroll.cac.psu.edu still has the files for older Mandrake distros.
Use only old Linux.
Corel 1.2 is quite nice on my Pentium 166 with 60Mb.
RH6.2, Slackware, older Debian. I ran FreeBSD 3.x on a Thinkpad 365 with 486 and 28 mhz. I usuallly rebuild the OpenSSL and OpenSSH from source to avoid major security holes for when I need to ssh to a work site.
I'm amazed how much more power even these $250 Netbooks have.
Bill
The specs seem more than sufficient for Debian. You will have to tune it after installing, obviously. I got X11 running on Debian using 10MB of RAM (on a laptop with 32MB).
As you mention, the tricky part is installing. If you can plug the HDD in some other computer, you can format it to ext2 and copy the files no problem. Debootstrap is a very useful tool for this: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/426
If you can't plug the HDD somewhere else, it's not really a big issue, just find a floppy distro that can see your HDD, can connect through FTP or HTTP to some other computer, and then just use it to boot and copy the files like the link above shows. It doesn't really need to be a distro, anything that can create ext2 partitions and do FTP/HTTP will work, but linux is probably the best bet when dealing with unknown hardware.
This is a well known one diskette distro: http://www.toms.net/rb/
The geek shall inherit the Earth.
You can still download floppies for a FreeBSD Net Install. Assuming your network card works with the drivers on the boot floppies you should be able to do a base system net installation of FreeBSD and then build whatever else you need from the ports tree afterward (or install the binaries from the packages collection. Should make for a small, clean installation with only what you need and nothing else to take disk space or consume your limited resources.
No, your hardware has become that obsolete.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Some people may still have misconceptions about Gentoo. The negative stereotype has long passed, though. Gentoo is, really, a meta-distribution: a dist that lets you make your distribution based on what you want and need.
You could do what some folks have suggested and get a really ancient dist, and that may be fine .. but it will have all the limitations it had back in the day, and nothing new without a lot of manual compilation and work. (No newer shells, html renderers, etc.) Gentoo just automates the process, and since you're building for x86, you could easily build on another box as the parent suggests. (It's actually not trivial to truly cross-compile a dist between architectures last I checked, but I haven't really done a lot of research. However it is trivial to build for a different architecture which the build machine supports.)
This way you get all the stuff you want anyway, and all the work to do so is streamlined. Building a boot disk should be easy (as long as you can find a disk drive for your current box!). Check the wiki for details on how to do a lot of specialized things.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
The reasoned you can't find a non-bloated distro is probably because you are searching for the terms 'desktop distribution'
http://www.toms.net/rb/
Fits on a floppy.
But you'll need an internet connection to install anything - by default AFAIK all it can do is bash work. To install packages you'd either have to compile every single one or just compile an apt-get or similar system to use.
http://www.puppylinux.org/
Needs a cd-drive or USB-port however!
~100mb big it is known to work on hardware with only 32 megs of ram. Contains Xvesa and Xorg servers with a million and one programs already installed that allow you to do anything out of the box. Puplets (community variations) are also available that are both smaller (ie barebones) or bigger.
Also see http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/
I've used Knoppix in the past (the CD image) and it had an hd-install option that would put itself on the harddrive. You would be able to tell if X works using just the live CD then decide if you want to install.
[url:http://www.knoppix.org/]
[url:http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Hd_Install_HowTo]
What is this obsession with old or cheap crap hardware recently? No, really.. I'm not trolling, this is a honest question. Did everyone here gone broke or something?
As to the original poster, why don't you do us all a favor and recycle this old piece of shyt, buy a used 3 years old notebook and stop wasting everybody's time by asking for support of 15 years old hardware.
hey i went thru this a few months ago. a laptop w/ a 100 mhz pentium 1, 24 MB of SDRAM in a non some weird looking non SODIMM format. about a 500mb of hard drive space, a singular modular bay with a floppy drive module, an extended battery module, and a cdrom module. serial, parallel, and pcmcia slot but no usb. It came w/ a pcmcia 802.11b wifi adapter but no ethernet adaptor.
I tried ubuntu 9.04, tomsrbt, dsl, and puppy. funny enough i had the most luck w/ ubuntu. It was the most hardware compatible and i was able to perform a bare minimal console only install. it would boot up and i could log in but it only had a few KB of memory free so trying to do much of anything would send it thrashing. I dont really remeber what the issue w/ puppy was but tomsrbt and dsl both there were hardware compatibility issues that kept me from installing.
After I got bored with it, I tried unsuccessfully to give it away so it eventually found its way into the dumpster.
Get yourself a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive for it. Though finding one might be rather difficult or expensive. Or pull the hard drive out and track down an IDE adapter. I remember being able to access laptop hard drives a little bigger than that with adapters that would convert the smaller IDE connector on the drive to a standard 40-pin connector. You could hook it up to a desktop machine, install Linux and then put it back in the laptop.
Though I have to also agree with some other people that suggest getting a newer laptop, at least one with a CD drive.
While probably not a solution to the original problem, an answer to the specific question about native ext2 images instead of LiveCD iso images is this-
The Fedora and CentOS LiveCDs do contain a native ext3/4 filesystem image embedded within a squashfs image. The normal Fedora anaconda/liveinst installer works by copying this image directly to the target destination then using resize2fs to expand it to the destination's size.
My ZyX-LiveInstaller at http://filteredperception.org/ goes one further and does this process with the running copy-on-write version of the filesystem, allowing for a rebootless LiveOS installation.
But of course these LiveCD sized filesystems are on the order of 2G (compressed about 3:1 by squashfs). You can probably find a minimal spin that brings that down a bit, but not enough for your needs. A real answer of course is as others have said- get a distro of the same vintage. Linus himself commented on the bloat recently didn't he?
I have a useless think pad that for a time was my picture server. I used redhat and booted a floppy and then used a driver floppy for my NIC. This let me install just what I needed from a server over the internet. I killed the RPM database for some reason I don't recall and could NOT find anyone who catered to boot floppy installs. Granted I could have fought and beaten on it and a local PC to do it but I gave up and used another junk one with a CD in it to install Damn Small Linux. It's clean and it's cool and right now it's running some ethernet testing at work.
The old one is going to be a range dummy.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Yes, Linux really has become that bloated. It's possible to get stuff working, but it's incredibly slow. Getting something to install will take a lot of tweaking (for example, the debian installer will have a lot of trouble if you have less than 64MB of RAM) and tedious work. The install process takes several hours, and if something goes wrong, you usually have to start straight from the beginning again.
I had Debian installed on a Toshiba 460CDT with 32MB RAM, and managed to set it up with X, networking, a window manager (icewm) and a web browser (links2). I tweaked it as much as I could, but it was still not very usable.
Recently, I installed Windows 98 on the same laptop, set progman.exe (program manager) as the shell, and k-meleon as the web browser. Now it's quite tolerable for web browsing use... and it does this while having a fully featured GUI. (and before you say anything, it has not crashed or bluescreened once yet. I've been using it for about a week for web browsing)
I'm a linux fan usually, but I have to admit that Linux isn't worth much on old hardware, especially very old hardware.
http://kmandla.wordpress.com/ -- This guy has one of the best recent blgos devoted to running Linux on systems similar to the one you described. He has covered evrything you need.
Go for NetBSD instead.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If so, I'd have a look at LTSP. At work we're re-purposing a bunch of old thin clients at our branch offices to PXE boot into a modern Ubuntu server. The setup is very easy under Debian/Ubuntu and you'll get a modern OS on every screen.
Runs on 486s, still.
we seriously need a slashdot faq
Be strong - chuck the damn thing in the trash now. I know it's tempting. We've all been there. But, unless your nerdiness borders on psychopathy, any sense of achievement you derive from resurrecting that relic will be short lived, and soon replaced by the realisation that you just wasted a heap of time on something utterly pointless. While you might get a little pleasure from the process of getting it up and running, actually using such a pathetic piece of crap once you're done, when people are giving away machines orders of magnitude more powerful, would be utterly perverse. Don't do it.
Oh no... it's the future.
DESQview!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OpenBSD - www.openbsd.org you'll have a fully functional OS, with no bloat and will run really well on that system.
Go take a look. It is around 50MB of space. Yes, it is typically a live CD, or USB distro. But that doesn't mean you can't get it to work. I personally have installed it on a system without CD/DVD, USB, etc., by doing a network install. That may or may not work in your case, as I do not know any PCMCIA network cards which support PXE-boot. That said, you could remove the hard drive. Pop it into another computer and do the install that way. The live CD distributions do a full hardware check even after doing a hard-drive install, so as long as it can detect your hardware normally, it will work even after you pop it back into your laptop. You won't find another light weight distribution that is as fully functioning as DSL out there. You can even get apt-get to work with DSL to install some other applications if you want (assuming that the system has enough power to run them).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I have current versions of debian running on a Pentium Classic with a 75MHz CPU and 48MB RAM (as a server), and CentOS on a laptop with 64MB RAM running X.
After the install, I disabled all unnecessary services, and replaced gnome.
Full disclosure: this isn't Linux. It is, however, everything you asked for and more, and it fits on a single floppy. I'm sure the guys in their forum will be more than willing to help you out.
http://kolibrios.org/
If you want linux specifically, tiny core linux is what you're looking for:
http://tinycorelinux.com/
Happy computing!
it going the wind2 way, bloat, useless crap, like in ubuntu.. bluetooth app, palm app, hardrive, 4 package adders,
Using anything other than the most very basic console will be painful on a machine that old. Someone suggested using older software, but that won't be very fun, since the web will be practically useless on an old browser.
i have a Toshiba from that era that I have used as a dumb terminal on and off over the years. At one point I had gui-less version of linux, with a frame buffer version of vnc and used it to connect to my main machine. It was fast and served well as a bed side web browser for years. At another pointI had a LTSP server set up, and used an LTSP network boot floppy to use it as a dumb terminal. That was pretty cool too. Probably the most useful was using XDCMP and just having it login in to the remote X session on another linux box. A basic X setup with XDM and connection to a remote server. XDMCP worked quite nicely.
Any of those well proven technologies will make that little old machine useful again, provided you have working network and video drivers.
DSL Linux
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Why would X have worked on any builds of OpenWRT???
Way back in the day I used to browse the web on an IBM 8086 with 640k of ram, using something similar to Lynx. I know there are versions out there for DOS so a 486 should be plenty. Not sure though how well they handle the web code on more "modern" sites crapped up with php, flash and css.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Really, why bother with such an ancient bit of kit? You can pick up a much more capable second-hand laptop from EBay for around 20-30 bucks + shipping (i.e. at least pentium, 128 megs, SVGA, pccard etc).
Better than throwing it out: make it useful again.
Twinstiq, game news
First time I installed Linux was on my 486DX-33 w/8MB RAM and a Trident TVGA 8900C ISA gfx card. Console was fine, but X11 was extremely slow (Redhat). Way slower than Win 3.11 or even Win95. I wouldn't bother with X.
It's a Pentium-90 with 64MB of EDO DRAM. Thing runs Damn Small Linux really well, but it's got rather more RAM than you do. Might be worth a shot if your BIOS supports booting from a CD -- the very last BIOS update for my box enabled that. You'll also need a junker 40x (ish) CD-ROM drive: the 6x drive this thing had originally wouldn't support booting either. I can even run Firefox 2.0 on this; takes 20-30 seconds to start up, and the redraws are slow, but it works a lot better than you'd think. Dillo's pretty decently fast, but OTOH the browser sucks.
Were I you, I would go with an older version of Slackware or Debian. I ran Debian 2.1 on a slightly lesser machine in 1999, and it performed well. That means being stuck on an obsolete Web browser, of course. Deb 2.1 shipped with Netscape 4.5x or 4.6x or something like that. You could probably get away with compiling a recent version of ELinks or Lynx... if those won't work, try doing a static compile on another machine & copy the files over.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I recently installed Debian 5 on a Pentium 75Mhz with 16MB of RAM and a 500MB hard drive. Debian still distributes floppy install images which include support for PCMCIA network cards.
Can anyone suggest a slim, up-to-date, linux distro based on Redhat or Fedora? Do I just need to run a standard install and de-select everything?
a few years ago, I came across a 486 motherboard on ebay. It was an FIC job with PCI slots on it. I had wondered what, if anything, could run on it in 2005. I picked it up for next to nothing, grabbed a 486 100MHz chip and went about building this frankenmonster machine.
In retrospect, I wish I had that time back.
I had 128MB of ram on this thing, an 8MB Matrox Millenium II, a pair of 4.3GB UWSCSI drives and an Adaptec 2940UW card. Networking came from an old 3Com ISA slot 10base Nic I had (and, oddly, still have to this very day!). Win98? yup. NT4? yep, 2000??? Absolutely. RH7.3 and 9? You betcha...
Then it got old, I longed for something that could actually do stuff. It was cute for the moment, but overall a gigantic waste of my time.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Find yourself a copy of OS/2 Warp and a bunch of floppies. You can do a floppy disk install and it will give you the best graphical experience on that hardware. Of course you'll probably be stuck with Lynx to browse most sites,
What, me worry?
If I remember correctly, RedHat 4.2 did run on that hardware. Albeit, with a very "loose" definition of running. The hardware I tested:
CPU: 486 @ 33MHz
RAM: 16 MB
Again, IIRC, the boot time was over ten minutes. Even when I ran this test it was for an "academic" exercise only. The Pentium class CPUs and motherboards ran circles around their predecessor, i486. The typical Pentium class motherboard had at least 32MB, and more than double the performance. RH 4.2 would boot in about 2 minutes on a Pentium (vs. over 10 for a i486).
So, in the end, if you get RedHat 4.2. running, then you'll get "props" and "respect" but not much else. It's only good for an academic exercise. The hard fact is that a modern Linux really requires 128M RAM. Specialty distros like DSL may let you get by with somewhat less, but you won't be running Ubuntu 9.10, Fedora 12, or Slackware 13.0. So what, time marches on, and (so far) Moore's Law keeps giving gifts: (cheaper, faster, and more power efficient hardware.)
To quote National Lampoon, "Give up."
get angstrom, from angstrom-distribution.org .. its a debian-based distro.
Give that sh*tbox a Viking Funeral.... quarter cup of kerosene and a flicked match! 8-P As others have already noted, you can literally find PILES of better lappies at your community waste recycling centers....
my cell phone is more powerful. Buy a $150 closeout computer and install linux. You'll make your money back with the lower wattage power supply and you'll be less frustrated.
you can build a distro as slim as you want or heavy as you want. and it creates ext images after compilation.
http://buildroot.uclibc.org/
I ran into the same thing in one of our labs at the university. Let me just say, finding a linux distro that works and performs well on older hardware is pretty tough. Tried everything from old redhats to Corel Linux. This was a few years back and maybe I just couldn't find some niche distro... but in the end, the best OS I found to use was... Windows 95. We built some apps with QT and it did its job.
We figured if we ever got new computers, we could install linux and just recompile.
So my advice to you, sure to get you shot in slashdot... save yourself the time and effort and just get windows 95. You can get a basic browser and ssh in there.
Debian Minimal is what you're looking for.
However, it's still pointless to do what the submitter is attempting. 486 machines weren't even interesting targets 9 years ago. Any recent version of Fedora won't boot on a 486, since Fedora is now compiled for i686 and up. Even if you got it to boot, it would be too slow for a modern X, and nearly too slow even for a console.
The only modern-day task that a 486 machine can still perform acceptably is IP routing. Most people still have "slow" (by networking standards) DSL or cable connections. An old machine is perfectly capable of handling such speeds. But it's still a very bad idea. Energy costs are so high these days that buying a new low-power router machine is much cheaper than running a 486 even in the medium term (1-2 years), and the new machine will be much more capable and featureful. For $99 you can get a SheevaPlug which comes with Ubuntu and consumes 5 watts.
If I was setting up a 486 machine anyway, my distribution of choice would be Voyage Linux. Voyage is just a very small Debian Lenny installation with a few additional (small) packages for embedded environments. It doesn't ship as an ext2 image, but rather as a tarball that you untar, which is just as good. The kernel is compiled for 486, so (unlike Fedora) it will actually boot. In theory, you can apt-get anything in the Debian repositories (including X, GNOME, etc.), but in practice it won't work on a 486. There are just too many differences between modern X11R7.5 and contemporary versions to the 486 like X11R5 or X11R6. I've done this before, and I can tell you that you won't be happy with the GUI even if you get it to run.
A lot of commenters have suggested running an old distribution. This is a bad idea on any machine that you plan to connect to the internet. Even if there's a firewall in between, old versions of Linux have so many security holes that they represent an unacceptable risk. Old Linux versions are just as insecure as old Windows versions. Don't make the spambot problem worse. As a side note, distributions that provide no mechanism for in-place security upgrades are also insecure. This rules out most mini-distros like DSL or Puppy Linux.
Basically, there's no way to run X securely on such old hardware. Just forget about it. If you intend to use it as a text terminal, then it might be worth setting up. Even then, don't leave it on all the time, or your electricity bill will dwarf any savings. (If you're not paying for the electricity, still, do the rest of us a favor, and save the planet from global warming or something.)
Here's distributions that boot from floppy: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=links#floppy http://bootdisk.com/linux.htm Then, you can install whatever you want via PPPoE.\: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/apds05.html.en http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html Here's some recommendations from a 486'er: http://www.ipt.ntnu.no/~knutb/linux486/linux486.html
You should probably be looking at other operating systems. Check out Kolibri (not sure if it runs without a CD to install) or FreeDOS (which comes with floppy images). Both will fit in a very small space and will provide a graphical desktop with about 10MB of RAM.
The last time I used dillo, it was OK but the experience was reminiscent of a text-based browser (except that dillo rendered some images). Do you really need dillo, or would a browser like elinks cover your needs? If you can get rid of X, then I think there will be a number of more current options open to you.
http://elinks.or.cz/
Alternate distro perhaps not yet mentioned :
http://minimalinux.org/ttylinux/
openembedded, it's a bit like gentoo (based off it actually) but it compiles 486 environment fine (e.g. for soekris devices) and X works fine (e,.g. on phones and such devices)
I have a roughly similar system (486 "laptop", 32MB RAM, no CD, floppy only) that runs OpenBSD relatively well. As long as you don't install KDE or GNOME, it should be fine for light-duty work. It isn't a drop-in replacement for Linux, but it's extremely easy to switch back and forth, especially with the heavy documentation.
Have you tried BasicLinux? http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/ it's really easy to find ditros that run on such hardware, just don't expect to be using 2.6.x kernel.
An older version of Slackware will serve you well. Make a boot and root floppy, boot them, install. My very first Linux box was comparable to yours, though it was a desktop, and it ran Slackware '96 (aka Slackware 3.1) beautifully.
Cruft is a minor consideration. If all you want is a box that boots to a command prompt, Slackware makes it easy. I view it as a construction set for making Linux boxes, instead of a pre-packaged Linux box in a can.
No matter what you do, you are going to have to find some way of getting the distro off the CD. Slackware's network install may be what you need.
...laura
Take it to your local recycling bin and just forget about this piece of garbage. Really, buy something better and more power efficient. I recommend a Sheevaplug if you want to keep price low, power consumption low, and get a lot better system in general.
No longer under development, but who cares? It works. Was intended to run from one floppy with additionals running from a second, but has other configuration options. I ran it on a 386 Thinkpad with DOS 6.3
muLinux (mu = micro)
http://www.micheleandreoli.it/mulinux/mulinux.html
muLinux is a minimalistic Linux distribution, suitable for old computers. X11, GCC, VNC, SSH, Samba, Netscape etc. are supported on additional addon floppies. It can be installed from DOS/Win9x or Linux, without repartitioning.
Plus the head developer's personal project a single floppy Linux, Lepton, at the same site:
Lepton is the temporary name for a single floppy Linux, based on the kernel series 2.4.x. It is my lab where I do experiment with the framebuffer device in Linux.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
port v6 Unix to it? Your machine is somewhat comparable to the PDP/11 hardware that that OS ran on.
SRSLY the hardware in question was state of the art in 1994, which was when I bought a spiffy new DX266 instead of a then-dodgy P75. If you think 2009-1994=20 then I suspect you're using one of those dodgy early Pentiums.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
The MAIN problem I see with using old now unsupported distribution versions of BSD / LINUX is that security patches for such versions and their packaged applications are no longer generally being offered / maintained, and there will be dozens or hundreds of potentially trivially remotely exploitable code execution, DOS, and other security vulnerabilities in the OS, the services, and the applications, and there will be nothing you can easily do to fix these problems lacking official maintenance and contemporary patch package releases for the version you are running. Even some of the "long term support" versions of products are only supported for a few years, and the oldest of which that are still supported are still often too new for the type of hardware the OP refers to. If the OP wanted to compile her/his own BSD/LINUX distribution, there would be better hope of using modern version / patched software but configured to run on that old hardware, but that is probably way too much work just for an "appliance" in search of a convenient distribution.
The problem with non mainstream distributions like Damn Small Linux, Puppy Linux, LTSP, et. al. seems to be either still insufficient portability to old CPUs with little RAM, or an infrequently updated monolithic distribution model that isn't really based on individually freshly updated packages / patches such that the most recent overall distribution is probably months or a year or more out of date with respect to security patches and bug fixes.
I've got an old 64MB Pentium based laptop with a fine KB / screen / HDD / CD but a slow CPU and not much RAM that I've also
been looking to turn into a basic web/email terminal for very basic internet access (e.g. no flash, no silverlight, not even AJAX sites, et. al.).
I've failed to boot the most appropriate known Debian Live CD version on it. I've failed to boot Linux Mint 6 & 7 on it. I've failed to boot Fedora Live CD and Ubuntu Live CD on it as well. It seems like most modern LINUX distributions don't like running on 64 MBy RAM, or with CPUs with these kinds of limitations.
I've run into similar problems with a Pentium based Fujitsu laptop with 256MBy RAM too.
I believe part of the problem is likely something that I started running into with LINUX and BSD distributions several years ago with my Mini ITX VIA EPIA C7 / EDEN based motherboards. They don't support the platform OPTIONAL X86 CMOV instruction, but for a long time there was (and maybe still is) a GCC bug that emitted code that uses CMOV but doesn't do the mandated run time check to see if the instruction is supported and provide a work-around. Further some of these are not "i686" class CPUs and may lack other features that some kernels are built to rely upon, whatever those are.. SSE, SSE2, whatever. Because of the CMOV GCC / kernel problem and the transition from "i386" compatible kernels to "i686" compatible kernels being commonplace / the minimum supported by the distribution media, I started to have to compile custom BSD (OpenBSD / FreeBSD) and LINUX kernels on some machines as of several years ago.
Now I would assume the GCC bug relating to CMOV is fixed or well known, but AFAICT the distribution maintainers just mostly stopped caring about old CPUs and limited RAM configurations and turned on optimizations for e.g. i686, i586+CMOV or whatever by default for their packaged binaries / media, hence perpetuating the incompatibilities with old i386 / i486 CPUs.
I wish there was either an embedded version of something like VNC / RDP / X that could act as a graphic / audio / mouse terminal to a remote PC/VM that actually ran the OS and applications. AFAIK most of those things need a fairly respectable OS distribution and X11 and so on to run on top of, thus making the problem of having a secure terminal almost as hard as having a secure PC with a small general purpose distribution.
Otherwise I wish there was some kind of BSD / LINUX distribution that was geared to handle hardware with old i386 / i486 class
Let me tell you what you will discover at the end of this exercise: Computers are a LOT faster today than they were 15 years ago. Moores law is transistor density doubles every 18 months or so which translates into a 1/2 price drop or 2x the speed or power. This exponential progression is roughly equal to a 10x speed increase or 90% price drop every 5 years. Applying that to a machine that is 15 years old. That's 5+5+5 which meant it's about 1/1000 as powerful or valuable as todays machines. 1000x is a bit too much but think about any other stat of the machine... 28M x100 = 2.8GB (a decent amount of RAM for a machine these days) 750MB x 100 = 75Gb (small by todays standards) 1.44Mb drive vs Flashdrive which people literally give away these days. (floppys died for a reason - I can only assume you are too young to have experienced the frustration of losing an important document to some grit in your pocket) Trust me - it's not worth it. (I had to resurrect a few machines myself to come to this realization) At least start with a better machine - I'm sure you could get something better for free, put a wanted ad on craigslist or look at surplus auctions (schools sell old machines by the lot)
I'm in general agreement with the "that's WAY to old to be worthwhile" crowd here but I will give you the benefit of the doubt and ask "resurrect for what purpose?" There are very few thing that can truly be done with a 486 in 2009:
So really, yeah, I can see there are things you can do, and I can appreciate not wanting to waste something, but I just can't see anything really worthwhile that could be done with this hardware outside of single-purpose stuff like a dumb terminal, recipe database, weather station, etc. Only worth pursuing if you have lots of spare time or just really love to tinker of the sake of tinkering.
Also: even though it's a laptop, I can't imagine the battery is any good, and replacements are probably hard to find by now, so it'll either be stationary, or portable to the extent that you can go anywhere as long as you're within 10 feet of a power outlet. So I can't see you taking this thing to coffeeshops or conferences or anything. If you have a particular goal you want to reach--say you love taking notes in vi and want something you can take to conferences--then you'd be better off getting a newer unit with wireless and a decent battery.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
http://www.freedos.org/
Try here: Deli Linux. Specs: 486 +(exactly) 750mb hd. Most likely you can trim down the floppy install in some manner to bink that back enough to be meaninful. Try the forums. Hope that helps.
By-the-by, I get why anyone would want to "waste their time" with such efforts: Because You Can. Please disregard these post `90's, Pentium-based infidels. Deli's tagline: "`Why the heck make a Linux for such old crap ?' you may ask.'" (Because) "I can't stop playing with it." (Taken directly from the front webpage).
~Just as a thing fails if it lacks a kernel, so too it fails if it lacks a skin. ~ Rumi, Discourses
See if you can find someone with Santa Cruz Operation OpenServer or similar. I know there is much hate and loathing on Slashdot with them and when applied to management it is completely deserved. But they make a X based Unix distro which runs very well on old small low horsepower hardware. Or at least they used to. Back in the dark ages. Course you might not be able to find anyone with the license keys anymore. Still - it'd come closer to running on the old stuff than most other choices if you want something full featured.
My 82 year old mother has been running it for years on a P90 and refuses to change. She'll probably still be running it when she dies. Runs solid as a rock and she refuses to connect to the Internet as well so patches aren't a concern.
That would be my primary concern with many comments saying run old version X (including this one). The old stuff frequently has holes that have been patched. If you don't run any world services and never do anything as root with real world access, you might limit the risk. The risk won't be 0 though.
Junk the old stuff and move on.
Oops, Friday math fail.
Time to stop posting and start drinking... :)
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
That's nonsense. Boot times might not be fast (most services can be disabled) but there's no reason a 486 wouldn't smoke at the console.
X11 with a lightweight window manager like Blackbox would work just fine on an old CPU... The problem you may run into, though, if you use a stock build of a recent X11, is running out of RAM, and constantly swapping to disk. Still... avoid that, and you'll be fine. I've certainly got 128MBs of EVDO SIMMs lying around... And even 32MB would be managable if you go with something optimized for low-memory systems.
It'll take a good 4 years before the cost of electricity pays for your ShevaPlug.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Maybe the guy lives on a poor country or has very low funds. If this machine is the better he can get for some job, let's help him.
My sugestion is openbsd with a custom kernel, because the generic will eat so much memory. I run a firewall with 1GiB RAM and everytime I check ram usage it is bellow 20M.
port v6 Unix to it? Your machine is somewhat comparable to the PDP/11 hardware that that OS ran on.
It's MANY times faster than the PDP11, there are 20 years between them.
I think this may be what you are looking for...
You can install it from a floppy and it will run in 24MB's of RAM.
Pretty modern and lite.
http://forum.slitaz.org/index.php/discussion/38/floppy-install-how-to
Slitaz Linux is my favorite these days for older hardware and the requirements are modest to say the least.
This will not apply to your situation but I installed it on a machine with 256MB's and I can run Opera use youtube and do all kinds of things on this machine, Ubuntu would run but it ran like molasses on a cold day....
I can't think of much you can do with a 486 at least for running any modern program. I also own a 486 but mine is a desktop. I keep it purely for sentimental reasons and for playing a few older games on their native OS and equipment. Granted my currebnt 486 is much better than my original 486 and the specs could even be considered waste. 486 DX2 66, 128 MB EDO RAM, 1 GB HDD, built in 10 Mb Ethernet, 64 MB 3DFX Voodoo 5 PCI for Graphics, and a Soundblaster 16 ISA for Sound. The unit has a 3.5 and 5.25" Floppies and a CD-ROM. It is loaded with Windows 95. Even with these specs the best it can do is run Master of Orion, Heretic, DOOM, Road Rash, and the Original Warcraft. Older versions of Winamp run but wheter local or pulled over network the best the unit can muster for mp3 playback is 1/2 quality mono even while optimized for 486 processors. Again the only reason I keep this machine is to play some of my first games and because my first PC I ever owned was a 486 DX2 66Mhz Machine. Oh it does browse the internet but firefox doesn't like running and the newest version of ie that can run is 5.5 Windows 98 is too much for the unit.
Inherited Will. The Destiny of the Age, and the Dreams of the People. These are things that will not be stopped. As l
That's nonsense. Boot times might not be fast (most services can be disabled) but there's no reason a 486 wouldn't smoke at the console.
If you're using the 486 as a console, and nothing else, then it will work. I mentioned this in my original post. However, text consoles by themselves aren't very interesting these days. It's not like the average person has a machine lying around that lacks a display console. If you try to do anything else on the 486, such as use the disk, then the machine will thrash. Remember, 486 machines predate the advent of DMA transfers, so you'll be sucking up all of your (already very limited) CPU just to manage disk activity.
I really can't see a 486 being useful, even in console mode, unless you literally need a console for some reason.
X11 with a lightweight window manager like Blackbox would work just fine on an old CPU...
I really doubt it. I've used Blackbox when the occasion calls for it, and although Blackbox is great, it's not fast enough for a 486. An AMD Socket 7 K6 is about the slowest machine I can tolerate, even with Blackbox.
And again, even if the X server runs, what would you do with it? Perhaps you missed the part where the submitter mentioned that the machine's display resolution was 640x480. I mean, 640x480, are you kidding? It's also a laptop machine, which means that upgrading the video card is not an option, not that it would be worth it anyway. You mentioned running out of RAM, but you forgot to consider video RAM (which is not easy to upgrade).
It'll take a good 4 years before the cost of electricity pays for your ShevaPlug.
4 years is not that long a time in this context. I certainly wouldn't want to go through setting up a low end machine any more often than once per four years. Besides, if you factor in either the extra time required for setting up and using such a slow machine (at minimum wage) or the risk of future energy price shocks, the time to break even is much closer to 2 years than 4 years. And finally, the SheevaPlug was just one example. Plenty of other commenters have mentioned that you can get Pentium 3 machines for free these days, which won't save any electricity, but will be a lot more pleasant to use.
I have Vector Linux 3.2 installed on a Pentium 66. I split the (?1.2 gig) hard drive into two partitions, lap-linked the file (~320 meg) to the first dos partition, and used a Vector Linux boot disk to load the file and install it to the second partition. I have 16 megs of ram on the Pentium 66, so I think you install it successfully with your 486 system.
I too have old hardware:
486sx16 with 12MB and 275MB drive, 2 ISA 10baseT - use for testing of IPCop.org linux firewall. Works great.
K6-3D 400 with 256mb and 10G drive - Had to get Ubuntu 7.04 because new versions would not find IDE drvies correctly and had problems with ACPI (or lack of). Then upgrade upgrade upgrade not to 9.04. Took awhile. It is what I am writing on now.
My next projects are Dual PPro 200 with 256MB and 2 2G drives. It was running Linux before with NT3.51 in a VMWare session, but that been a few years. 2 SMALL form P6-500 with 256MB and 10GB.
I also run Core 2 QUAD with 8GB and 256G and 1TB with VMWare 5 sessions. So I do not just have old hardware.
I am finding Linux has loss some of its roots for being able to bring more work out of older equipment. But it does not stop us from trying, does it. Good luck with your project.
I used an old redhat diskette a few months ago to netload from their servers, was fun and slow but did work. Other information for doing these types of installs.
http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst
http://marc.herbert.free.fr/linux/win2linstall.html -helpful.
Also remember the Async ports on these old machines and be connected to another machine and used for network loading too. ;-) Just takes longer be works very well.
Thank you
Maybe.
But the cheap routers with a 200 MHz MIPS CPU can struggle with certain usage on residential broadband connections. And I'd expect there to be more overhead involved in just pushing frames around on a 486.
I used to have a collection of old hardware and tried doing this a couple times. You are going to find that it is so incredibly slow that whatever satifaction you got from getting it to work will be more than cancelled by the disappointment in the performance. I tried installing a couple Linux flavors on a Dual Pentium Pro 200 with 1 GB of RAM, a computer that is light years ahead of your i486 and was quite depressed about how poorly it performed. The fact is that successive generations of CPU's really smoke the previous ones, and two generations is too big a gap. Save yourself the aggravation.
Where'd you get that clunker - out of someone's garbage? That's the sort of machine you give someone you don't like, as a "favour."
No network card (at least from the specs you posted), no usb, 640x480, les than 1 gig hd, just a floppy drive - what are you going to do with that?
Best to find a copy of D0S 6x (or if you can find the Window95 floppy set, DOS7). Even Windows95 is too much for that. At least you'll be able to (sort of) play doom on it.
"I've spent the last few days trying to find a Linux distro that will work on that machine."
Holy crap, is that a worthwhile use of your time? I mean, assuming that "the last few days" equates to 4 days, and a geek-day has 12 working hours.. That's 48 hours. At minimum wage, you could have bought a brand new netbook for that, and you can bet that 486 laptop will never equal a netbook even if you spend the rest of your life tweaking it.
I have a similar laptop to yours except it only has 16megs of RAM, and also a PCMCIA interface with a combo 100Mbps ethernet and 56.6k modem. Basically Slackware will work if you are able to boot from ethernet.
But recent X are so damn bloated that I seriously doubt it will even start. Apparently recent X.org versions do not support ISA video cards. So that's probably the end of it just there.
Right now I have Windows 95 and a Slackware 9.x on it (I think it used XFree86 3.3.x). I can use IceWM and some Gtk 1.2 apps, but the sucky X driver only allows for 8 bit color even though Windows 95 allows for 16 bit colour which is a huge show stopper. Also most Linux graphical programs are not designed to be used with a 640x480 or even a 800x600 resolution. You'll find yourself often with too big windows for 640x480/800x600 which is shame since Windows 95 in 640x480 works nicely. Anyway, 20 years later, X still sucks.
With Windows 95, I'm able to use Netscape Communicator 4, Paint Shop Pro and some other nice apps, even play Duke Nukem 3D and Magic: The Gathering. In Linux, you can play Doom with svgalib but that's about it.
You won't have any problems with console stuff in Linux though, even recent things. But in any event, you'll have to compile yourself a custom kernel for your hardware (and don't forget to enable the options for small systems). And no, unlike what someone said, the console will not be slow. To be able to access the HTTP config stuff of DSL modems, 'elinks' might very likely work with 24mb of RAM.
Since X absolutely sucks, it would be really cool if a Linux framebuffer driver was made to work with video cards of this time (they don't support VESA 2.0). You could use 800x600 / 256 colours and with a console window manager such as VWM it could be nice.
A distro that doesn't use GLIBC might be a good thing too.
Use:
/lib/modules/`uname -r` -iname '*fb.ko' -print0 | xargs -0n1 basename | sed 's/\.ko$//g'
find
to get a list of available framebuffer drivers. Possible candidates are: uvesafb,vesafb,vga16fb or possibly a specialised driver for your VGA card, if you can see one.
The syntax (in Linux 2.6?) in most cases is video:DRIVER:XRESxYRES-BPP.
Here's what I'm using: video=uvesafb:1024x768-32,mtrr:3,ywrap
Note: I'm not sure if the above will work with 28MB RAM. In that case, you can try the latest 2.4 kernel from kernel.org and links2 using SVGAlib. :-P
Also: Don't try running aptitude on the POS, you're in for a world of misery.
Good luck!
All your base (of 486 laptops) are belong to me....ha.ha.ha. Seriously, I still play Master of Orion, Civilization and X-COM. Old laptops make decent game consoles for the classics.
Unless your hardware is old enough that the kernel taking some 3-4 megs (instead of fitting on a floppy disk) is an issue, newer software is probably better.
Just go lightweight.
I would say Debian or Arch, not Gentoo. I like Fluxbox as a window manager, for a light system. That's about it -- add other things as needed.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
None of the other posters (that I've seen at least) have recommended that you upgrade the hard disk. You absolutely can. It will be some work but it will be worth it. A multi-gigabyte hard disk will make your system a lot more useful.
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/hda3 2.2G 913M 1.2G 44% / /dev/hda1 89M 85M 0 100% /boot /dev/sda1 3.8G 1.8G 1.9G 49% /usr /dev/hdb1 1.4G 222M 1.1G 17% /var /dev/hdb2 1.6G 374M 1.2G 25% /home
That's from my 486sx25 with 32 MB of RAM. No X, though. And not a laptop.
Just remember that you need a /boot partition if your machine can't natively see large hard disks. My machine choked hard on the 2.2G IDE drive I put into it, so a 100-megabyte /boot solved the problem nicely.
Maximize the RAM. This will help too. Unfortunately 32 MB is the maximum mine will take. (In theory it might take more; there are larger 30-pin SIMMs than I'm using now, but my machine wasn't built for them, so I haven't bothered trying them. They might work but they would probably be a waste of money.)
This is a waste of time. Some wastes of time are still fun. If it entertains you to do this, do it. I keep my 486 running out of nostalgia only (it was my first *nix box).
Incidentally if you want some low-end box projects, check out http://www.lowendbox.com/wiki ... the author is really interested in very modest VPSes (sub-$5 a month for many) but the principles would apply to modest whole-computer systems too. I put lighttpd on my 486 out of inspiration from that wiki.
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/
In that list, I tried blue flops before, (a two floppy distro, with an enhanced graphical Links browser) it worked fine on an old mostly broken pentium 1 laptop with 16 megs RAM that I was given. It says in the notes minimum requirement is 16 megs or 8 with swap, and a 386, has Ethernet card drivers and a text editor and some other stuff. I know I was able to get online with it and surf reasonably.
http://blueflops.sourceforge.net/
This is something I've thought about for ten years. When people try out linux, or when techies try out linux, it's always on a spare machine which is inevitably worse for specs than their windows box. Inevitably they never fully make the switch.
So many years ago I decided I would treat linux well and give it the preferred hardware. Guess what, I was much more satisfied having a great system rather than something hobbling along. The user experience was obviously a total notch up and so you get a better impression of linux because it can then do so much more.
My opinion on this particular story is that it's completely bogus to think you'll approach something you'll make significant use of with the specs we see given. When you see a garbage system, hobbling along, ask yourself, what did I actually expect to come out of this? Something almost as good as my dual-core windows desktop? Come on.
Just try it. Give linux your windows hardware and put windows on your worse, spare hardware. See how it feels when the shoe's on the other foot. Not so fun anymore.
Now, perhaps something constructive. Why bother with this old machine when you can dumpster dive for better *easily* or you could buy a sheeva plug for $99?
Selah.ca. Pause, and calmly think on that.
Pre-emptive multitasking with 1000hz scheduler, multithreading, ring-3 protection
Responsive GUI with resolutions up to 1280x1024, 16 million colours
Free-form, transparent and skinnable application windows, drag'n drop
IDE: Editor/Assembler for applications
USB 2.0 Hi-speed storage, webcam and printer support
TCP/IP stack with Loopback & Ethernet drivers
Email/ftp/http/chess clients and ftp/mp3/http servers
Hard real-time data fetch
Fits on a single floppy
I'm surprised no one mentioned it... perhaps geek nestalgia keeps the perspective at bay...
someone mentioned a $100 cell phone, which is close...
I have to wonder, how much is your time worth? how much time will you spend getting an old relic to operate, and possibly even interact with the world around it? If all you need is telnet/SSH, sure you'll be fine... but as it's already been mentioned, web browser needs are well beyond what that machine will handle.
If you have nothing to do, no job to worry about, sure, spin your wheels... for those with jobs, feel free to calculate your hourly rate (I use the ratio of 10k/yr = $5/hr, which I think is close enough), and determine how much money it'll spend to write the floppies (if you have another machine w/ floppy drives, and the cost of disks), install, perform updates, etc.
I'm not suggesting you spend every dime for the latest and greatest... but I'd at least consider something with a P4 or greater, 256-512 RAM... such computers can be found on ebay and CL for $25-50 (the TRUE value, for all you over pricing CL'ers!).
Chances are, the monitor will be the biggest expense, and I imagine you've already got one.
point being, keep the value of computers in mind, and as importantly, the value of your time!
Thrash has a very specific meaning, which you seem not to understand.
It won't make a good file server, but that's about it. You're not going to be doing heavy multimedia, or running a major database server, so it's unlikely you'll be doing enough disk access that you'll care.
A 33MHz 486 is plenty fast enough for MP3 playback, image display, text web browsing (Links was GREAT in the days before CSS completely took over), e-mail, and probably decent document editing, if you can find yourself an old copy of some lightweight office tools (AbiWord1, etc.)
You'd probably do a lot better if you knew how to optimize Linux system performance, as well as code.
That's almost DVD resolution. It's not that bad.
The #1 reason people complain about screen resolution is because they can't figure out any way to change font and icon sizes... Set that, and maybe default scaling in your image viewer and possibly web browser, and you'll have to look close to notice.
640x480@256 colors is just fine for the basics. Many apps have very good dithering, so you'll have to pay attention to really notice, even with images.
You're making an awful lot of false assumptions...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I use a 486 laptop as an alarm clock. The power usage is negligable. Maybe you don't recall but 486s didn't require CPU fans, the lower clocked versions could often be found without even a heatsink. The thing shipped with a 5V 5AH Ni-Cad battery pack for heaven's sake, and I could play DOOM on it for a couple hours when it was new.
Thrash has a very specific meaning, which you seem not to understand.
My slashdot ID is lower than yours. I understand full well what thrash means, and I meant thrash.
You're not going to be doing heavy multimedia, or running a major database server, so it's unlikely you'll be doing enough disk access that you'll care.
The mere act of administering a system (to install security updates, say) is already more disk access than a normal person would care to endure.
Perhaps you missed the part where the submitter mentioned that the machine's display resolution was 640x480.
That's almost DVD resolution. It's not that bad.
It's 2009. 640x480 for a graphical display is bad, and no amount of scaling or font size tweaking will fix it. But even if we totally ignore this and grant everything you said, you're still ignoring huge issues that make the idea of using this laptop totally unworthwhile. For example, laptops from the 486 era had passive matrix displays. They are positively painful to look at for long periods of time. There's a reason why passive matrix displays dropped out of the marketplace despite their low cost.
Besides, if you factor in either the extra time required for setting up and using such a slow machine (at minimum wage)
You're making an awful lot of false assumptions...
Minimum wage is if anything an extremely conservative estimate of the time value of money in any developed country. If the submitter wants to provide additional information then by all means go ahead.
I'd probably not use such a machine for everyday computing but if you want to have some fun, try building Linux from scratch on it and try out how well the current kernel handles the old hardware.
The answer to your question is "Damn Small Linux". You can install it from floppies; instructions here: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/install_from_floppy.html. Runs beautifully on lower spec hardware than you've got.
Cheers, Tim -- Tim Janke Part mad scientist, part lion tamer: sr. software engineer, global team leader, project mana
I have this running (not crawling) on a P3.450 with 384 RAM. One CD image and everything works first time! You can get it at http://www.linuxmint.com
Dear slashdot, I have an old punchcard based machine that I'd like to resurrect so I can run dillo and some xterms but I can find punch cards for ubuntu. Has Linux really gotten so bloated that it can't run from punch cards? I though it was supposed to run on old hardware? It's not as though my expectation of running a modern Linux distro on hardware less powerful than my cheap cell phone is unrealistic, are they?
http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/
what are all you guys blabbing
LFS, Linux From Scratch
If anything is not bloated, this is it. (it = what you make of it.)
I would say forget using it as a regular system, it's just going to be painful to use a browser on, especially when you already have other stuff. I would suggest installing NetBSD (4mb minimum memory requirements, 8mb for X11) and a slideshow screensaver so you can use it as a digital photo frame. Alternatively you could use something like conky to use it as a live monitoring station for your network.
An old copy of BeOS will boot graphically off of a single floppy disk and will definitely outperform any other operating system from that era. No security patches are ever needed, because hardly anyone ever heard of it. Security through obscurity. There's still fledgling support from die hard fans and an open source clone progressing nicely. You can find R5 & boot floppy images online. It really does scream on hardware like yours. Should boot in around 20 seconds. It even has a UNIX-like shell. Once upon a time, it was my primary O/S. The 64-bit filesystem never corrupted and it could push a quad Pentium Pro box to near 100% utilization. Nothing has ever matched its multithreading nor its responsiveness since. I was sad to see it go. Coding for it was a dream too... assuming you like C++ more than C.
Check the hardware support list, but looking at it, it supports DX2s/DX4s. AFAIK UNIX was never ported to i386 before the addition of the FPU, although I could be wrong about that.
The reason why I'm suggesting this is because, as well as being a particularly compact, high quality codebase, OpenBSD is, as you probably know, specifically oriented towards security. A firewall or software router is one of the only uses I can think of for a 486 these days.
If you were going to install NetBSD, you could possibly mess around with using the CPU as a controller for something weird, especially if you know how to actually rip the motherboard out and attach it to a robot chassis. ;)
OpenBSD's internal fork of X is probably very tight I'm guessing as well, so you will possibly be able to run that. You almost certainly won't be able to play mp3s on it, and personally I wouldn't even try Dillo on it, either; use links.
The DX4 was the first machine with video playback, if memory serves.
Good luck with it, and have fun. If you can find a tight enough system for it, you'd probably be surprised at the number of uses you could find for it. It'll run ash, ed/vi, sed, and grep, at least; and who really needs more than that anyway, right? ;)
http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/-/655/862/-/10823678/Disgo-Net-Browser-3000-64MB-2GB-7-Windows-CE-Netbook/Product.html?searchtype=genre Less than £100 and a much better spec than yours.
Since you want a browser, you probabely have a choice between w3m, lynx, links, elinks or some very inadequate X11 browser. I don't know if Dillo is up to the task of displaying current webpages in a proper way.
You should look at older versions of Opera (they have an archive). Some run on very low spec hardware and also check out how much you can tweak a current version of Firefox to run on those very low specs.
Since someone suggested Debian, please make sure it is compiled for i486. Some distros nowadays compile for the Pentium.
I recall that QNX had a relatively impressive demo on a single floppy.
http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
mpeg123.
Command line. Works on a 486.
You can try SliTaz (http://slitaz.org) loram version : http://download.tuxfamily.org/slitaz/iso/2.0/flavors/slitaz-loram-cdrom.iso
It's a neat project, but you could probably replace it with an atom board for the money you'd otherwise spend on keeping the older one powered up and cooled for a year.
I put this on a 15 yo toshiba satellite pro (p75, 40MB ram, 750MB hd), works fine.
Getting wireless from a pcmcia card took a little work.
The CD rom, which is a custom toshiba thing, worked fine which was pretty impressive.
Ofcourse once the itch to get everything running was satisfied, it just sits on a shelf now..:)
http://www.delilinux.de/
TCO says you should get a newer machine. Not necessarily a NEW machine, but at least a pentium (4.99999-86).
And c'mon, what would be the use of dillo these days? I tried it for a while in my EeePC 700 2G and it was mostly useless. The web today is (unfortunaly) too dynamic for it.
(And trust me, Im into embedded computing and "I just want whats enough for me" trends)
OpenBSD should boot and run on that. I can't remember if they're still shipping XFree86 along with X.org but it wasn't so long ago they were. Don't expect to do anything useful with it in X, unless you're willing to run an old version of Netscape or something. Maybe Dillo will run.
POKE 36879,8
That's like an assload. 8 years ago, I installed a then-recent Debian on a 486 with 8 MB RAM and RAM was the limitting factor. Calculation of the apt-get dependency tree would take hours.
You might wanna try something like that: Install a server that serves up Debian boot images, boot via your PCMCIA network card, install a Debian base system on the hard drive and then simply pull software from the network.
Or you could toss it. That's what I'd do.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
It is designed for the old hardware.
http://tiny.seul.org/en/
Living in Chile
I installed RedHat 5.2(Apollo, 1998) on a 486SX 25MHz, 8MB of RAM. I still have it. I had the same issue as you. No CDROM. I has a DNS and DHCP server on it. It only has a floppy and an ISA NIC for external adapters. Boot 1 floppy and then installed the OS to the HD over NFS. I would use that or Slackware 4.0. Both really stable. They are the best period OS's from that era. As far as updates, put it behind a good firewall which you should have anyway. It's a non-issue. Your system should scream compared to mine. If you have to go buy an ISA NIC card make sure it has jumpers to configure the IRQs and MEM address.
The 486 might be good enough to work as a thin client. Setup a 640x480 VNC server desktop on a more powerful machine and run a vnc client on the 486. Some experimental DOS vnc clients exist. VNC over a LAN is going to be faster than what the 486 can do on its own.
Two solutions I've used in the past for a IBM Thinkpad 166 MHZ with 80 MB of ram:
1 - DeliLinux - specifically designed for really old hardware (at the time it was kind of buggy but surprisingly well made for being a 1-man show)
2 - Base Debian with a fluxbox interface
( total size of both ranged from ~ 600-1000 MB )
Both of those were pretty simple to set up. I think one of the biggest hurdles is just getting it installed without a CD drive. For hardware that old it may be best just to remove the HD and install it via a PC with a CD drive.
This is a total load of crap. Even of the 8088 IBM compatible computers, most (if not all) had DMA chips. I learned assembly programming on IBM compatibles before 486s were in regular use, and all the IBM compatible computers had DMA chips. As best as I recall, the only PCs which didn't have DMA chips were early IBM and compatibles, the 8-bit 6502 based computers (Atari, Apple, Commodore), early Macintosh, and maybe the Atari ST and Amiga. I could be wrong in they may have had DMA chips, but I know later computers did have them. Here is an article about old 8088 computers and DRAM refreshing.
About using a 486 and X: you obviously know nothing about this. I used a 100MHz 486 with 16MB of RAM from 1996 to about 2000 or 2001, and it ran X okay. When I say "okay", I mean okay for me. Current "fast" computers with KDE or Gnome are not okay for me: they run slow. Yes, Mozilla had problems, but it certainly was not slower than browsing with current "fast" computers. This guy wants to run Dillo. He will be just fine. Dillo is fast even on a 486.
Yes, I did have problems with swap storms. Mostly if I opened too many windows in Mozilla (or a heavy page), or if I tried to edit a big photo (larger than a resolution than probably around 1500x1500) in GIMP. However with more ram, this won't be as much a problem (I think the submission said 24 MB).
You must be using a different version of blackbox than I do. As I remember, blackbox was just fine on my 486 I don't recall it being slow, though I mostly used fvwm. Blackbox was certainly snappy on my 500 MHz K6. I know because the fvwm project degenerated into a buggy mess with fvwm2 and didn't seem to have the features I needed anymore, so I used blackbox quite a bit. I don't really like blackbox because of the way it is set up, but it isn't slow.
In fact, if you compared blackbox on a 486 running against KDE or Gnome on a "fast" modern computer, I doubt you could tell the difference in response speed. If anything the Knome computer would be slower. I think blackbox had a delay setting for accessibility, but so do Gnome, KDE and MSWin. Maybe you had that turned on? Blackbox Configuration wiki session.autoRaiseDelay: look down in section 2.4.8
It may require using an older X binary (better lock it out of the internet with -nolisten tcp and such), it will probably also require compiling a custom 2.4 kernel, but I don't see the big problem. What is with all the naysayers?
Get it here:
http://www.delilinux.de/
As others have pointed out already NetBSD, OpenBSD and perhals FreeBSD should work ok too on you old hardware.
Good luck!
Mikael
Go for Slitaz, it works well and its even smaller than DSL...and it keeps its kernel up to date. It works well on old hardware, had a friend who got it up and working on hardware similar to the OP.
What are you talking about? You are using a CLIENT. What servers would you be running on that?
Let me be clearer. Assume that you decided to go with a Vintage version. Say, one with a Linux 2.0 kernel. What would be your security exposure? *IF* you decided to run sshd, you would be vulnerable. You won't be running a web server, or file sharing.
So -- if you wanted to expose the machine, make sure that sshd is updated. *IF* you want any other services, tunnel them. But for a client machine? Honestly, it doesn't matter.
I would recommend a small base system, but with a kernel that supports user-space file systems, to allow you to run sshfs for your file "sharing" (access) needs. Which precludes that old zipslack system, but I believe slightly more recent versions would work perfectly for you.
For example; I run a Fedora 8 variant on my netbook; I am sure that there is vulnerable software on it but what is the real exposure: none -- there aren't any open ports.
The only exposure would be a flaw in the network stack itself.
What you seem to be getting confused about is the strangely ENORMOUS vulnerability of old Microsoft products. Which I don't understand (how the hell could a client system be SO BAD with security?).
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Hey, I remember fighting with an 80386sx20 based laptop that had a 640x480 vga grayscale display and 2mb (yes, 2mb!) of ram, and a 40mb hd, and I got X to run on that thing! Granted, it swapped like mad just to get a couple xterms going, fvwm was too much of a wm for it to handle, and the only network connection was with the internal 2400 baud modem, but it was awesome! The ram was the worst limiting factor in that situation, I did get some version of the linux kernel to boot, custom compiled with everthing pulled out of it. Minix, though horrible to install, was what I ended up using to get X going. Smaller kernel memory footprint.
Those were the days...
an intel 486 would have been 1000x easier to get going then. You're job is too easy.
Of course without a usable browser as everyone else says, what's the point, unless you love vnc and network lag.
...and possibly somebody already mentioned this but this is about how to get the OS onto the hard drive when you can't boot off the install media.
One of the nice things about Linux is the ability to install on one machine and run on another. I've done it a number of times and I'm thinking of doing it again... it's actually a Celeron-based system, but does not have CD nor boot from Flash drive. But all I have to do is put the drive on a machine that does, and do the install there.
Of course it means that I need an adaptor to install a laptop ATA drive on a desktop machine, but those are cheap. (Or a newer laptop with the same drive interface, I've done that too.) It also means you need to make sure nothing gets installed that requires a newer processor. Any hardware auto-detection may require tweaks later (usually network cards). It's not a perfect solution, but it's worked well for me many times and saved me having to figure out how to do installs using floppies. *shudder*
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult.
here is a link to debian 2.0 floppies. scroll down under and they are under "distributions". each link is a floppy image. I had this running on an IBM laptop with pentium 133 and 64MB of ram. xwindows and everything a few years back. A lot of people a chiming in about security issues with these old distros, but if its just for fun and behind a firewall you should be fine. wouldn't put it on the internet with a routable IP.
http://chaddsfordpc.com/linux.php ps: click my google adds while your there
you can also find the old redhat installs if you look hard on their website, but debian is much better. or should I say that apt-get beats RPM hell.
GO PHILLIES
You should use an OS made for thin-clients. I made one from Debian to install using USB, but you could definitely try a network install, I'm sure. The total installed size with Firefox, X, Fluxbox is 297MB. Adding xterm would be very easy. If you need more info, let me know
use BSD without GUI and you're fine
Remember, 486 machines predate the advent of DMA transfers, so you'll be sucking up all of your (already very limited) CPU just to manage disk activity.
This is a total load of crap. Even of the 8088 IBM compatible computers, most (if not all) had DMA chips.
They had DMA chips on the motherboard, but hard drives did not support DMA transfers stably until well into the Pentium era. Why do you think Windows did not include DMA drivers? Hell, Linux distributions didn't even default to DMA drive transfers until 2001 or so. DMA at the time was used for things like sound cards.
About using a 486 and X: you obviously know nothing about this. I used a 100MHz 486 with 16MB of RAM from 1996 to about 2000 or 2001, and it ran X okay. When I say "okay", I mean okay for me. Current "fast" computers with KDE or Gnome are not okay for me: they run slow.
This is the same thing that a lot of other commenters have suggested. "Run an older distro with an older X" or something. That will indeed result in acceptable performance (if you ignore the human factor of the crappy 640x480 passive matrix LCD screen). But you'll be running a trivially insecure machine with who knows how many exploits. X in particular is a large program that needs suid root privileges (not true anymore on very recent setups with KMS, but that is not going to help the submitter). Those old linux/X versions that could run with limited resources did so at the price of insecurity. All that stuff today that you perceive as "slow" is the price of security engineering. This is especially the case for critical components like the kernel, the web browser, and yes, the X server. I'm not talking about KDE/GNOME here. Updating the X server alone from X11R6 to X11R7.5 (by which I mean, the protocol, not the actual server codebase) would cripple a 486. I would never run any version of any system software (such as X) dating from 1996 or 2001 on a machine accessing the internet today.
It may require using an older X binary (better lock it out of the internet with -nolisten tcp and such), it will probably also require compiling a custom 2.4 kernel, but I don't see the big problem. What is with all the naysayers?
The naysaying is because the submitter clearly doesn't know what he's getting into, and what you describe (while possible) is very hard to get right. Even if you configure X not to listen to any ports, a security hole in your (custom) kernel or your web browser means one more zombie bot on the internet, and although one more makes no difference, I wanted to do what I can.
When you add on top of that the fact that the machine has a 640x480 and likely passive matrix display, you have to ask: what's the point.
I had a laptop like this. I put Windows 95 on it and sold it on eBay to a college student for $15. Seriously, avoid the stress man! You can get a much more worthwhile obsolete laptop for less than $100. One that you can browse the internet with, put wifi PC cards in, serve web pages with. I recommend anything over 400mhz. Trust me, they are cheap and easy to find.
You could use Voyage linux http://linux.voyage.hk/. It allows you to generate a disk image, so no cdrom or usb necessary. It is based on debian, so you can install whatever debian offers. Typical installation requires 128MB.
Come on, nobody suggested OSX yet? I thought /. loved Apple products.
latest Debian (Lenny) works flawlessly on my 233MHz pentium (mmx) with 0Kb cache... this machine got already two slots for sdram so i put over 300Mb in it. as i see it, your main problem will be having too less memory. you still could try an install, because the Debian installer has a low memory mode, but that's no fun, right? so if i were you and had no additional ram left but a floppy drive, i would buy a couple of floppies and read through this howto: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/index.html and make myself a bootable floppy for this thing. if you succeed, you will be able to see if it's still working. besides that, you'll learn to cope with a small harddisk (700Mb) later on.
have fun
If it has no network port why do you want a browser?
And if you can add a network (PCMCIA slot?) then you can do a PXE install.
Grab a distro from the same era and install it. Plenty of old Slackware ISOs online for you to use.
If you insist on having recent software, then treat it as an embedded system. buildroot will compile the kernel, busybox and uclibc into a simple system that you can extend. And it is capable of outputting an ext2 image as its results (very handy!). Then cross compile Xorg/kdrive and other goodies on there (linked to uclibc)
In my opinion if it takes more than 4 hours to get some old computer hardware working, it would be cheaper to just throw it away. I promise you, getting your 486 DX/4 laptop working is going to take you more than 4 hours. It's from an era when laptop vendors were building very proprietary systems.
If you were trying to get an old Tadpole SPARC notebook to work, at least you would be trying to get something rare and interesting to work. An old 486 is neither rare nor interesting.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I was able to get a recent 2.6.X series kernel to boot on a older non-isa bus 386. Building it was easy, turn off everything that wasn't necessary, enable some embedded features, etc.
Debugging it to boot wasn't easy. The machine had a non name processor upgrade, that wasn't recognized, which caused the kernel to halt. Once I got that patched, the cache wasn't enabled, so I had to patch boot.S.
So now I've got a kernel that boots, and turns on the cache and the $#@!ing keyboard won't work... There was some switch I had to pass on the kernel command line for the keyboard to be recognized.
I wanted to use ether-boot with it, but current version were no go on this hardware, and the older version I did get to work wouldn't work with my kernel. I gave up debugging it. It'll make a nice project for some sunny day.
I ended up booting from a floppy, and using nfs root, I didn't have any useable SCSI-1/SCSI-2 disk available, the only unit we had was a full height 5 1/4 unit, which sound like a 747 in your office when it turns on, it also drew so much current it shut off the power supply in the external drive chassis I had.
I made some other changes to get swap over NFS to work but it was horrid, evil nasty abortion......
I built a busybox userland and some other tools, dropbear. This machine did run X at one time, but I wouldn't consider it even an option now. As the machine only has a trueblue IBM vga adapter, and could only do 320x240x8bpp if we were lucky.
No doubt you could get X to run on some older hardware, you're just going to have to have the time, patience, and know-how to do it from scratch. You definitely don't want to build your userland or kernel on these machines, setup a cross environment and do it there, unless you have some crazy saint patience.
I built a kernel with it over NFS (10 Meg Ethernet), it took like several day. I used to build kernel on this machine, as recently a 2.0/2.2, local disk of course on it, within an hour or two.
Still pretty good considering the hardware is close to 21 years old, making it officially an antique that can boot a current kernel. How's that for legacy?
http://slackware.cs.utah.edu/pub/slackware/ I just found this, and lo and behold! I used to dig my OLVWM desktop - and it ran like the dickens - just a matter of mucking about here and there but it worked wonders! Ran Slack 3.2 through to 3.6 on a 486 machine for quite some time JUST CUZ - and I don't like to throw out hardware if it's working! This has got me into the groove of setting up a VM with Slack again...nice thing to do for a Sunday!
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
I ran a server for work, apache + qmail + squirrel mail + clamav + spamassassin on Debian Sarge (and I think later Woody, not sure about the timing of that) on a 233mhrz, 32mb ram, 8gig HD box for several years. Then the drive fused solid and the box seized up. But it took like 3-4, maybe even 5 years before that happened. I don't know much about the linux dev world, and if you can still find a copy of Sarge around somewhere, or even if it'll run on your particular architecture, Debian wouldn't run on the replacement for that box. But if you can find it, I can't imagine why it wouldn't work. And it's footprint is pretty small.
K.
Hi, Try Slax, 190Mb and comes in a tar arch or iso, easy to install, has a recent kernel and xorg,
You can make larger if you want, good documentation as well.
Links...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAX
http://www.slax.org/documentation.php
http://www.slax.org/get_slax.php
Regards GlennsPref
Jeez a 486, why bother? I'm sure you could find a much higher spec laptop on ebay for next to nothing.
I mean realistically even if you got your 486 running, it would be dog slow.
IIRC it expands to a 100 meg disk image, of which about 50 megs is used. http://sourceforge.net/projects/user-mode-linux/files/Root%20filesystems/1/Debian-3.0r0.ext2.bz2/download It's an image you can copy right onto the drive. It was made for User Mode Linux, but I'll bet it'll work with only a little bit of apt-getting. Then you can dist-upgrade to Lenny.
He has the machine.
He (thinks he) has the time.
It could be instructive.
(In my case, the old tangerine iBook with Fedora 11 was plenty instructive. Did run nice until yet another used 30G drive died. The box won't recognize over 120G of hard drive, for either Mac OS or Linux, which, for a new 160G HD, left me with openBSD booting on a lower partition, but using the last 35G as its workspace. Didn't like that solution much, either.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
486 in the days of i7 is it really worth your time? even if you revive it, the second you hit its limit the second you wish you had not spend days trying. the issue is that all other software had moved on. i tried it with a 1 gHz P3 toshiba laptop, but then it couldn't even play youtube videos in decent smoothness. DSL/kubuntu what not, it's just not worth the two days trying various distros and drivers, compile my own drivers to make it work at a frustrating fashion. go shop craigslist.
You may try a MicroXwin distro.
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
I had a 486 laptop with 16mb of ram and a black and white LCD, I had good results with using pieces of slackware 10.1. If you want to save a lot of space, use strace and ldd to figure out exactly what files you need.
Compile a custom kernel with everything you actually have built in except for cardbus/pcmcia modules.
windows 3.1 FTW!!!
Maybe you should get laid instead!
i don't remember terribly well but have a feeling that even knoppix had trouble with that kind of memory size, though it could use a swapfile to alleviate the problem to some degree, let alone the appallingly memory hungry ubuntu, fedora and similar liveCDs.
On a P4 laptop with 256MB of ram, a few meg of which are eaten by the graphics card, ubuntu liveCDs have failed to reach a usable state, while an installed system using the alt install disc runs very nicely indeed. Not that i expect your system to cope with these modern bloated distros when installed, either, not in their default configurations at any rate. Maybe it's worth trying debian, stripped down with twm or fluxbox.
Hey... try Breadbox Ensemble! It will revive any old PC! It is still in active development and may even have an application for you. http://www.breadbox.com/
Xorg-7.5 was committed to trunk this weekend. Your issue may be fixed with that upgrade
I have Zipslack running on a 486 DX4/120 notebook with 24MB RAM. FVWM and it does everything I need in a 120MB basic install (as the name suggests, it fits on a zip disk!). I don't think the notebook has the boots for a 240MB KDE install...
The way I did it, because the laptop had neither CDROM nor USB, was to pull the 500MB drive, format it to FAT, add basic DOS boot image (IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, COMMAND.COM, customised but basic CONFIG.SYS) then make a directory called "LINUX" (yes, very original) then install the Zipslack DOS image straight onto it. Moved the LOADLIN.BAT to that folder as well. Replaced the drive, booted and typed "LINUX/LOADLIN". Later on, I added a single line "LINUX/LOADLIN", to AUTOEXEC.BAT so power-on-to-login was entirely automated.
Caveat: the latest kernels have broken the UMSDOS filesystem and there is no plan to fix it.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
If you're determined to resurrect this hardware, for $15 you could add a 128 Mb stick of PC100 memory from Newegg, then any of a number of compact distros mentioned above become straightforward to support.
It's not bloated, hardware has just been updated. It makes no sense to continue developing for decade-old hardware when almost nobody uses it. If you're looking to run linux on it, you certainly can, take a gander at http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs and put together exactly what you want, using absurdly low amounts of disk space and memory.
If you want a desktop distro that's pre-configured, go back in time and find an old version that was created specifically for that hardware's era.
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http://the.earth.li/~martin/sisela/
http://puppylinux.org
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org
All work on a 486 with 24 Mb ram (tested by me)