Installing Linux On a 386 Laptop

An anonymous reader writes with a link to Hack A Day's step-by-step guide to installing Linux on a 386 laptop, which looks like a nice rainy-day project, as long as you are a stubborn hardware collector. It gets complicated, though, because 386 support has long since disappeared from most mainstream distros, which is why the writer went with Debian 1.3.1.

Comments

this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's now considered a "hack" to install software onto a device it was meant to run on?!?!?

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

but.... but... but.... it's teh Linux!!!!onehundredeleven!!!!

Re:this is a hack?

[fragMasterFlash]

Considering the i386SX has a 16 bit data bus and can only address 16MB of memory I'd say this qualifies as a rather sweet hack.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why a hack? Linux has always been able to run on shitty old gear. It was around when said shitty old gear was bleeding edge. Pick an old distro that was designed to run on the gear of the time, and durr, it works.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the i386SX has a 16 bit data bus and can only address 16MB of memory I'd say this qualifies as a rather sweet hack.

As KingRobot mentions further down the page, this is exactly how you used to have to do it. There's nothing "hackish" about this at all. I mean, honestly, it's like calling it a "hack" to install Windows 3.11 on this laptop.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me guess, you were born after the year 2000, weren't you?

This may surprise you, but many of us here used far less powerful systems for decades before systems like the 386 described in the article were even released. I remember getting my first 386, and being astounded at how much more powerful it was than the 8088-based PC I'd been using up until then. That PC, in turn, was much more efficient than the account I had on the shared VAX at work.

In fact, you can actually do quite a lot with such a computer. You just can't be stupid when doing it, however. That means you have to write your applications in efficient languages like assembly, C and C++, and you need to have a minimal level of care with the algorithms you choose. It's not like today, where any jackass can throw together some shitty JavaScript script and run it in a highly inefficient web browser like Firefox.

You kids can play on my yard all you like, just don't be blatantly ignorant about the state of consumer computing a mere 20 years ago.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the i386SX has a 16 bit data bus and can only address 16MB of memory I'd say this qualifies as a rather sweet hack.

Uhh, no. The distribution he chose was from the mid 90s. A 386 was an underpowered machine at the time, but well within the specs of a linux distribution.

Believe it or not, 16 megabytes used to be considered a lot of memory in the mid 90s. Windows 95 required a minimum of 4 megabytes, with 8 recommended.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

The data bus width is irrelevant (only slows it a bit), and I ran that version of Debian GNU/Linux with 4MB RAM. Where's the hack?

Re:this is a hack?

[rwa2]

10 years ago I installed Slackware on an old 486 monochrome laptop through a serial port. I was too cheap to buy the proprietary external floppy drive.

I think I ended up resizing the 120MB [sic] DOS partition down to 40MB, and then using some serial port transfer program to send over a minimal linux loader that could load the installer kernel from DOS. Then I think I had to keep booting to DOS to erase and transfer over a few more of the 80MB+ of slackware floppies and install a few packages at a time until I had enough of a system to get a PCMCIA NIC working, and eventually X. But I think I spent most of the time in screen and emacs.

Good times.

Re:this is a hack?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Why a hack?

Because it's not a DX chip (full 32-bit). It won't work "out of the box" and I've spent the last decade using apt, so I'll call it a hack. Looks a lot simpler than ELKS which is the only other way I know to achieve the same thing (early Windoof will run on the same chipset, but requires thunk layers)

From the Debian Installation manual:-

However, Debian GNU/Linux squeeze will not run on 386 or earlier processors. Despite the architecture name "i386", support for actual 80386 processors (and their clones) was dropped with the Sarge (r3.1) release of Debian[2]. (No version of Linux has ever supported the 286 or earlier chips in the series.)

I've managed to install to 386-DX chipsets with 4MB of RAM, but not the SX. Very impressive. Especially given the price I can pick up industrial single card 386-SX boards. Not of interest to gamers and such, but very, very useful non-the-less.

Re:this is a hack?

[tokul]

I'd say this qualifies as a rather sweet hack.

Nope. He is running old os on old hardware. Guess what people were doing with Debian 1.3.1 or Slackware 2.0 when 386SX was not old hardware.

Re:this is a hack?

[houstonbofh]

Oh yeah? Right now I have a Xircom Pocket Ethernet Adapter III in a sealed box. Still has the $39.95 price sticker on it. To get older, I have to go non-pc...

Re:this is a hack?

[Midnight Thunder]

Because most current software are developed with different limitations in mind. Doing anything with this sort if hardware these days is almost akin to doing embedded development.

Heck even a smartphone is more capable as equivalent hardware. Actually with that in mind, a better hack would be to be able to run a smartphone as a desktop computer, even with limited software.

Re:this is a hack?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I have a box of 8" Dysan floppies, still in the shrinkwrap.

Re:this is a hack?

[farrellj]

You said it!

I used to use a 386sx system as my firewall for my home network back in the 90s. It also was hooked up to my US Robotics Courier modem that I had from my days of running a BBS on Fidonet and PODSnet.

Now, if he got it to run X, I might consider that a reasonable hack...but just running Linux...lame.

ttyl
          Farrell

Re:this is a hack?

[jo7hs2]

Meh. I ran Windows 95 on a i386sx notebook for several years, with 10 megs of ram and a compressed hard disk, so I'm not really impressed. The floppy install took most of the day, and the boot time was almost a full battery charge towards the end of my run with the computer, but once it was running it was surprisingly functional, despite the 5/10/20mhz variable frequency processor setting.

Re:this is a hack?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Even an older embedded device(NSLU2 4 lyfe!) is substantially more capable. The one major kicker(at least for me, speaking as somebody who is OK in userland but not so much a hardware wonk) is that PC BIOSes suck; but(aside from a bunch of annoying bugs, and some relatively predictable losses in function as you go back in time) they largely suck in the same way. By contrast, two feature-identical embedded linux plastic router/AP boxes, released at the same time, might have totally different bootloaders and the ability to brick hard enough that some soldering and xmodem(if serial is still alive) or JTAG work will be required merely by messing up your flash partitioning...

You can brick a PC, at least one new enough to have a flash BIOS, or something old enough that configuring X wrong will possibly fry something; but embedded stuff is still much easier to really paint yourself into a corner with.

Re:this is a hack?

[ProgramadorPerdido]

Internally the SX had 32bits, only the data bus was 16 bits.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, if he got it to run X, I might consider that a reasonable hack...but just running Linux...lame.

I ran X in glorious 16 color on 386. It was upgraded to 16mb of ram because the year before i wanted to play doom. WindowMaker was doing amazing colour dirting and it looked much better then Microsoft Windows 3.11

Back then it did feel kind of hackish because i had to compile Xfree86, Wmaker and other stuff in manner that was not 'configure; make; make install;'. But i was also learning all this for the first time.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but all of that is referring to MODERN distros. This article is about running a distro from the era on hardware from the era. There's nothing special about that whatsoever. I agree that it would be a very impressive hack if he'd managed to get something modern onto the old machine - but he didn't.

Re:this is a hack?

[realityimpaired]

Actually with that in mind, a better hack would be to be able to run a smartphone as a desktop computer, even with limited software.

... you do realize that there's smartphone builds available for some distros? And failing that, you can get access to many full desktop functions running on smartphones, including terminal shell/ssh, word processors, web browsers, spreadsheet programs, etc.. Hell, Android *is* Linux, just with an interface that's designed for a small touchscreen as its main input device. There are smartphones with HDMI out ports that can be hooked up to a TV, and can accept input from bluetooth keyboard/mouse, even. So no, I wouldn't really call that much of a hack. In fact, the Motorola Atrix is designed specifically to function as both phone, and (with the help of a dock built for the purpose) a desktop/laptop replacement for light surfing/email duty.

Now, if you could convince Linux to run on something like a first-generation Palm Treo, I'd call that a hack. :)

Re:this is a hack?

[Kjella]

I think I ended up resizing the 120MB [sic] DOS partition down to 40MB

[sic] means that you're quoting someone else's typo, to show you just faithfully reproduced it. Since you're neither quoting nor was it a typo it doesn't make any sense. I assume you meant something like [yes, MB] though I'm not sure there's any latin for that. This has been an informational message by your local grammar Nazi. By the nature of this post, it will contain at least one typo.

Re:this is a hack?

[the_humeister]

Actually, if I were to do something like this, I'd use LFS instead. Or better yet, cross-compile NetBSD for i386.

1) cat or dd the laptop's harddrive to a faster computer's disk as a disk image
2) Mount the disk image
3) Compile and install the OS onto the disk image
4) cat or dd the disk image back to the laptop hard drive
5) Profit!

I once got a 386 for free and installed Redhat on it back in 1998. It's not that big of a deal.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the i386SX has a 16 bit data bus and can only address 16MB of memory I'd say this qualifies as a rather sweet hack.

That is completely transparent to the software level (even the OS), it is not an issue. The issue is the stray instruction generated by the compiler that isn't supported by an 80386, or the use of the more advanced paging features of newer processors, the support for which can be completely turned off during the kernel build process. Getting drivers to work on the old hardware in the device is probably the hardest part.

Re:this is a hack?

[the_humeister]

You can just cross-compile NetBSD for i386. And there you have it: modern OS on ancient 386 hardware.

Re:this is a hack?

[hairyfeet]

Except if you read TFA you'll see the guy used Debian 1.3 which I believe is old enough to actually support a 386 OOTB. I have to agree with the other posters I don't see how this can be in any way called a "hack".

What's next, an article about installing Win 95 on a Pentium I? Hell I have an old B&W G3 in the closet maybe I should write an article about installing an older PPC distro on it, get me some money from page views. I wouldn't even call it a "hack" to do what I'll probably do with it, which is install an AMD dual core in the case. This is just using an OS as it was intended on hardware it was designed for, nothing more.

Re:this is a hack?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Actually, if I were to do something like this, I'd use LFS instead.

Maybe if you took the time to read TFA you wouldn't talk rubbish

Or better yet, cross-compile NetBSD for i386.

That has been done (FreeBSD installed on a 386-SX) but it was a while ago, and it was a *big* job.

I once got a 386 for free and installed Redhat on it back in 1998. It's not that big of a deal.

You installed it on a 386-SX?? Really? I've got early copies of RedHat if the floppy disk haven't died, and plenty of 386-DX boards - I'm betting, like the RedHat manual says, it won't install on an SX chipset.

Re:this is a hack?

[gl4ss]

look, one of the reasons linux was sweet early on was that WHO THE FUCK HAD MONEY FOR 16 MBYTES ? it was better to stick with not using X back then. if you're going to install _anything_ on a i386 these days linux is the obvious choice, sticking to not using X is obvious choice. debian 1.3.1 though? that's not an obvious choice.

wouldn't qualify it as a sweet hack though. some crazy setup involving installing win 3.11 and win32s, installing some task-manager and hacking some later windows libs to work on it.. that would. because it would be crazy. if you want some use out of a 386sx, linux it is. but choosing some embedded aimed distro would make more sense. because you can then save on the memory use. or slackware, as apt really likes memory if my memory serves me well(and that's not such a problem with slack).

Re:this is a hack?

[perpenso]

If you had used Yggdrasil plug and play Linux in the early to mid 90s then the installer would have configured video, sound, etc for you. It was no more difficult to install than WIndows. There was no typing in your monitor timing numbers nonsense like other distributions from the 90s.

Re:this is a hack?

[SuricouRaven]

I tend to mix languages. The big number-crunching bit in C, and the rest in perl. It's just easier.

Re:this is a hack?

[RightwingNutjob]

What about the kernel?

Re:this is a hack?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Except if you read TFA you'll see the guy used Debian 1.3 which I believe is old enough to actually support a 386 OOTB. I have to agree with the other posters I don't see how this can be in any way called a "hack".

I did read the TFA. It's not what I'd call and impressive hack, and certainly not elegant. I suspect the writer is wrong about needing an older Debian (I've certainly installed Etch onto a 386-DX) - the laptop he used is too old to support booting an el Torrito CD, and definitely won't support the new hybrid d-i. But the non-hybrid d-i is available - I'd either use a floppy to initiate a 6.0.2 series debbootstrap network install - or pxe install using a romamatic image (I have a stash of Xircom RE100s). expert install acpi and dma off - select the low memory version at the extra modules screen. It's ugly and slow, and it's not "out of the box" (which would give you a gui install that wouldn't run in the amount of RAM he had). I certainly wouldn't have chosen a FAT file system - wtf was he thinking? As for all the fiddling with live CDs and ferrying things by floppy disk - three wires and some insulating tape would have got him a serial modem cable, with Tom's Root Boot on a floppy, that, and another linux machine (connected) by the null modem would have made the whole process pretty simple (without rebuilding the installer you need to type your boot parameters and append the preseed serial modem settings

What's next, an article about installing Win 95 on a Pentium I? Hell I have an old B&W G3 in the closet maybe I should write an article about installing an older PPC distro on it, get me some money from page views. I wouldn't even call it a "hack" to do what I'll probably do with it, which is install an AMD dual core in the case. This is just using an OS as it was intended on hardware it was designed for, nothing more.

:-D If it was a Classic Mac you could:- pull the guts out of it, seal up any holes, fill it with water and drop a gold fish in - call it a MacQuarium. Or do a variation of what I'd seen done - use it as a thin client. I was pretty impressed when I thought I saw a modern OS running on a Classic Mac in 256 shades of glorious gray - until I twigged it was just a thin client. People used to go to the restaurant just to watch Amarok on a Classic Mac.

Pretty sure the also declining HackaDay is owned by the same absentee landlords as Slashdot....

Re:this is a hack?

[volkerdi]

Now, if he got it to run X, I might consider that a reasonable hack...but just running Linux...lame.

Most kids today can't write modelines.

Re:this is a hack?

[asdf7890]

The 386SX was a 32-bit CPU internally (but with a 24-bit external address bus and 16-bit external data bus 7 circuitry to split 32-bit wide requests into two 16-bit ones) and will run Linux just fine given enough RAM, but many boards designed with the SX in mind would only accept 4Mb (sometimes less) which is not going to be enough for a modern kernel.

The SX should run anything the DX would but slower for 32-bit code at any given clock rate due to 32-bit requests needing to be made using two due to the 16-bit data bus, and due to some boards for the DX having support for a small amounts of cache ram which the cheaper boards (probably including all SX ones) lacked.

Some early 386 chips were faulty and would not run 32-bit code 100% correctly. These were actually sold as working "16 bit only" chips - if you have some of those they are not going to run Linux successfully. I don't remember if that affected SX models as well or if it had been sorted before they were first released.

I remember running a Linux variant (some version of slackware IIRC) on my old 386SX40 (AMD made a version clocked that fast) with 4Mb RAM, though I never did anything useful with Linux until the early Pentium days.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently there's precedent

Re:this is a hack?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Internally the SX had 32bits, only the data bus was 16 bits.

Yes... That was what I meant by "Because it's (the SX) not a DX chip (full 32-bit)" - The problem with the 16-bit data bus was not just limiting the total memory that could be addressed - there was also cache addressing problems. If there was just one 386-SX it'd probably have been better supported - from (fuzzy) memory most of the problems we encountered then (I worked for Compaq at the time) were motherboard ones rather than CPU. I.M.O. IBM made the smart move by ignoring the 386 at the time - they were expensive, and the boards to support them even more so. (and the SL series was an even bigger nightmare).

Re:this is a hack?

[crankyspice]

I've managed to install to 386-DX chipsets with 4MB of RAM, but not the SX. Very impressive. Especially given the price I can pick up industrial single card 386-SX boards. Not of interest to gamers and such, but very, very useful non-the-less.

Back in the day I had first Slackware (3.x?) and then RedHat (5,x) running on an Am386SX-40, with 4x 1MB 30 pin SIMMs and an ISA SVGA card (Cirrus I believe). Was NBD, just a PITA loading Slack from endless floppies. (RedHat I installed via an ISA NE2000 clone from an FTP server on the LAN...)

Re:this is a hack?

[Larryish]

Debian 2.0 ran fine on a 386-25 with 16 megs of ram, as long as you were content with the console.

You can even run a personal fileserver/webserver if you have enough room left on your 20 meg hard drive.

Also there is a relevant equation:

gpmdata + serial mouse = frustration

Re:this is a hack?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

I've managed to install to 386-DX chipsets with 4MB of RAM, but not the SX. Very impressive. Especially given the price I can pick up industrial single card 386-SX boards. Not of interest to gamers and such, but very, very useful non-the-less.

Back in the day I had first Slackware (3.x?) and then RedHat (5,x) running on an Am386SX-40, with 4x 1MB 30 pin SIMMs and an ISA SVGA card (Cirrus I believe). Was NBD, just a PITA loading Slack from endless floppies. (RedHat I installed via an ISA NE2000 clone from an FTP server on the LAN...)

The AMD was a game changer indeed. This is why I appreciate Google and Linux - it forces the established powers to pick up their game. AMD made Intel drop their prices and stop shipping crap.

Re:this is a hack?

[fritsd]

Now, if he got it to run X, I might consider that a reasonable hack...but just running Linux...lame.

X ran like shit on my 386DX until I bought 4 extra MB of memory for it; with 8 MB it was quite acceptable.
I think it was the "MCC Interim" distro; only 2 or 3 floppies as opposed to Slackware for which you needed to download whole boxes of floppies.

Re:this is a hack?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

The 386SX was a 32-bit CPU internally (but with a 24-bit external address bus and 16-bit external data bus 7 circuitry to split 32-bit wide requests into two 16-bit ones) and will run Linux just fine given enough RAM, but many boards designed with the SX in mind would only accept 4Mb (sometimes less) which is not going to be enough for a modern kernel. The SX should run anything the DX would but slower for 32-bit code at any given clock rate due to 32-bit requests needing to be made using two due to the 16-bit data bus, and due to some boards for the DX having support for a small amounts of cache ram which the cheaper boards (probably including all SX ones) lacked. Some early 386 chips were faulty and would not run 32-bit code 100% correctly. These were actually sold as working "16 bit only" chips - if you have some of those they are not going to run Linux successfully. I don't remember if that affected SX models as well or if it had been sorted before they were first released. I remember running a Linux variant (some version of slackware IIRC) on my old 386SX40 (AMD made a version clocked that fast) with 4Mb RAM, though I never did anything useful with Linux until the early Pentium days.

One of the main problems with the earlier 386s was the boards and cards. I remember some of the crippled chips you refer to - I also remember fake cache.

I no longer have my HyperRam cards or the PS/2s they fitted in - but one of the problems with the SX was the 16MB ram limit. It's not that Linux *can't* support the SX as much as it *doesn't* - and that policy was/is just to avoid all the problems. With big name manufacturers it wasn't so hard - but all those clones.... anyway. Except for the AMD386 nothing good happened between the 286 and the first of the 486s. (IMO)

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran Redhat 4.1 on a 386 with 8MB ram. On top of that, I got Quake to run without a math coprocessor. Amazingly, it was stable, even with two instances of Quake running. Framerate was around 2 seconds per frame.

Re:this is a hack?

[bill_mcgonigle]

X ran like shit on my 386DX until I bought 4 extra MB of memory for it; with 8 MB it was quite acceptable.

Mine was a 486/25, but I agree, +1 on the 8MB RAM upgrade.

What really got X working well for me, though, was buying a video card from some company called ATI. It had something called 'video acceleration' which meant the windows just filled, almost immediately, when a window was moved, instead of watching them paint on my Hercules card.

The ATI card even had 24-bit color at 800x600, none of this 512x480 nonsense I was used to.

Re:this is a hack?

[ceoyoyo]

Very impressive? He used Debian 1.3.1, which runs just fine on a 386 SX. He just installed it. Read the article.

I've installed Linux on a 386 SX too. Fifteen years ago.

Re:this is a hack?

[Hognoxious]

The hard part with older versions is sometimes finding them. I remember needing Redhat 7.2 (or was in 6.2?) because a version of SAP I needed to use would only run on that or a similar vintage of SuSe, and the latter was a RPITA to install without a fast reliable connection.

The other hard part is getting a sensible answer to a sensible question without some twat telling you you shouldn't be using it, without knowing *why*, telling you it doesn't support USB when it does, etc etc etc.

Re:this is a hack?

[sjames]

Perhaps it was "marketing Megabytes"

Re:this is a hack?

[Pentium100]

It does not run on a 286 though.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

So now finding an old distro is news worthy? Face the facts here, the guy did NOTHING that should have required the same skill set that was used in 1997 for the same exact thing. Having an old distro laying around is not news worthy. At all. Just get over it. This article was nothing but an attempt to make Linux look good in the eyes of the unknowning. But for the knowing it makes Slashdot look like a sensationalistic tabloid website.

Re:this is a hack?

[aztracker1]

I've got some blank punch cards... seriously though, when I was a kid we had to make our own stains to write on cave walls... get off my rocks!

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not impressed. You have 10MB of RAM, not 4MB, and the boot time sounds absurd.

          In fact, installing onto the 386 in the article, the biggest restriction is the 4MB of RAM. I installed slackware back in 1994 on a 386sx-16, 40MB RLL hard disk (I posted in the comments, Linux *does* support MFM/RLL hard disks as device /dev/xda instead of the normal /dev/sda or /dev/hda...) and 4MB of RAM. The 4MB was the kick in the nuts, going to 8MB makes a HUGE difference. 12-16MB is even better, you can run a light X desktop with that.

Re:this is a hack?

[Dasher42]

No, incorrect; the hardware of the 386SX was fully 32-bit internally. Its external buses and I/O were 16-bit, but it was designed to do this to require minimal adaption of motherboards designed for the 16-bit 286 while running all 32-bit 386 software. What you have here is an economy version of the real thing. This installation was more an exercise in sleuthing for properly compiled software, but the grandparent is correct, the hardware was designed to accomplish this.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

piss off

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait'll you see my abacus collection. It sits atop the pile of stone tablets I used before punch cards were invented.

Re:this is a hack?

[armanox]

Most kids today don't know what a modeline is.

Re:this is a hack?

[farrellj]

For many video cards on desktops, yes, but for 386 systems about half the video cards used in Laptops it took a Adept of xorg.conf to get it to work at it's full resolution and colour depth.

ttyl
          Farrell

Re:this is a hack?

[farrellj]

Hear! Hear!

ttyl
          Farrell

Re:this is a hack?

[TrekkieGod]

From the Debian Installation manual:-

However, Debian GNU/Linux squeeze will not run on 386 or earlier processors. Despite the architecture name "i386", support for actual 80386 processors (and their clones) was dropped with the Sarge (r3.1) release of Debian[2]. (No version of Linux has ever supported the 286 or earlier chips in the series.)

And if he had installed squeeze in i386, it would have been extremely interesting. Instead he went back and installed an old version of Debian from back when the 386 was supported. He installed a version of Debian that was MEANT to run on that machine.

I have a computer from 1993 still operating and running MS-DOS 5. I'm not about to write an article about it.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

I still don't see this as a hack. I ran Linux on a machine with 4MB of RAM with no troubles at all and I know there were thousands out there like me. It's not a "hack"; it's just "installing Linux".

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

We have an IBM 1316 drum.

Re:this is a hack?

[adolf]

For the record:

I have an AT&T/NCR 386SL laptop running a (quite old) version of Slackware. There were no nightmares involved with the installation that had anything to do with the type of CPU. It's as stable as a rock, although it does do slightly more stuff than most rocks...

If there are problems with the design that affect software, I'd like to say that they were sorted quite a long time ago.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

i got windows 95 onto a pretty crap old pc that was designed for win3.1 by installing win95 onto a newer machine and gradually deleting files until i would up with just a few floppies containing files that were required for the most basic win95 installation to actually start. then i just used sys to make c drive bootable and copied the files off the floopies and rebooted. no "installation" was required. after i got windows to start (took a while that sort of seemed like it was frozen) i was able to copy program files that i used (notepad, paint, etc). not sure whether this was a 386 (may have been even older). one of the limitations was the size of the hdd, which could only hold a few floppies of files. didn't end up using it for much but it was a fun challenge.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

It should work, if you can compile your own kernel (getting all parameters correct). You mus also be willing to wait for 20-30 minutes to bootstrap, given 20-40 MHz clock (generous, original spec).

p.s. If there are later '386 variants, have they worked out the sigma-sigma level microcode bugs?

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

google is your fucking friend ass hole. if you're going to belittle someone else's work, try not to make yourself look like a dickhead in the process

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux has always been able to run on shitty old gear. It was around when said shitty old gear was bleeding edge.

Uh, no. Linux was announced in August, 1991 when the '386 was already six years old. Linus may have had one, but it was in no way "bleeding edge."

'486 was the high end at that time, with the Pentium coming on the scene just as Linux was starting to get some press.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's so inconsiderate not to change the blog's name for the occasion.

Re:this is a hack?

[Osgeld]

did you do it in under an hour? first line of the article states that special fact

Re:this is a hack?

[manu0601]

What about the kernel?

It still has 386 support.

It is worth noting that cross-building NetBSD is as easy as running the build.sh shell script that comes at the top of NetBSD source tree. That will work from any POSIX system with an ANSI C compiler, and you can build NetBSD for any supported architecture.

Re:this is a hack?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

I have a computer from 1993 still operating and running MS-DOS 5. I'm not about to write an article about it.

Want a bet? Just make it sound harder than it actually is and sex it up with a picture. It's Hackaday - their diserning editors are... oh yeah - Slashdot! Different dog - same leg action.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

However, Debian GNU/Linux squeeze will not run on 386 or earlier processors. Despite the architecture name "i386", support for actual 80386 processors (and their clones) was dropped with the Sarge (r3.1) release of Debian[2]. (No version of Linux has ever supported the 286 or earlier chips in the series.)

That's not quite true. Despite the 286 lacking a memory management unit (MMU) Linux is available (admittedly without any hardware memory protection) as part of the ELKS project which apparently even supports the 8086 processor.

Now, if you actually meant no version of Debian GNU/Linux ever supported the 80286, then you'd be right on the money.

While ELKS obviously targets embedded platforms nowadays, I have personally installed Linux (can't remember whether it was ELKS) onto a bog-standard 80286 desktop (that had floppies, hard disk and originally ran MS-DOS) about a decade ago (when the original Pentiums were beginning to be obsoleted) as a lark. Beyond basic understanding of Linux and the command-line, absolutely no assembly or hacking required. That said, even back then, it wasn't a terribly productive usage of the machine.

Re:this is a hack?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

For the record:

I have an AT&T/NCR 386SL laptop running a (quite old) version of Slackware. There were no nightmares involved with the installation that had anything to do with the type of CPU. It's as stable as a rock, although it does do slightly more stuff than most rocks...

If there are problems with the design that affect software, I'd like to say that they were sorted quite a long time ago.

They were a nice laptop, though I never owned one. Not all early 386s were a nightmare - most of the "big" brands were well supported (I had a Compaq and a PS/2) - but many of the (low-end) home user machines were total crap - get just one jumper wrong and the machine would play dead. Redhill.net.au probably has a list of the worst - I recall buying one of the first non-Compaq 386's off them - it was a "full" AT board that the family could sit around - and was incapable of even running IBM DOS that ran fine on my PS/2 (286) - they were kind enough to apologise and refund my money. Most of my memories of that era revolve around trying to get Minix to do something (anything) and trying to get early Linux to play nice with the MCA bus and IBMs weird hdd format.

When I said it was a hack I meant ugly hack, and hack only in that it's not the recommended/traditional way to do the job. I like hacks to be elegant, if not, then difficult is good ;-p

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is full 32-bit, moron. The external data bus is 16-bits and the external memory bus is 24-bit (allowing only up to 16 MB of RAM without the use of bankswitching)..

The 386 core was a full 32-bit core with the Intel retarded PM and everything else. Do more research.

Re:this is a hack?

[Nyder]

No, this is not a hack.

No matter what some people try to claim, it's not a hack.

Running linux on a dreamcast? thats a hack.

Getting your gamecube running linux? That's a hack.

Getting your Palm Pilot to run linux? that's a hack.

Getting an 386 computer running linux is NOT a hack, linux is made to run on 386+ computers. Sure, it takes more work to get it to run on a 386, but it ain't a hack.

Or at least, that's how I see it.

Re:this is a hack?

[ceoyoyo]

God I hope so. Even Windows 95 didn't usually take more than an hour to install.

Re:this is a hack?

[adolf]

Perhaps we just have a different perspective on history.

Every properly-configured 386SX/DX board I ran across worked fine, whether big-name OEM or aftermarket...except for one strange AMD 386SX/40 board I had which had issues with DMA.

Which is just one example of slight (easy to work around under DOS) badness out of a whole sea of others that worked without episode.

(Meanwhile: Of course jumpers made a difference. That's why they were there. (Did you expect that they'd installed jumper headers onto a board with the intention of having them do nothing at all? FWIW, I can tweak a single RAM setting on my Q6600 box and the machine will play dead, too. BIOS settings from the past decade == the jumper settings of the prior decade.))

Re:this is a hack?

[Osgeld]

windows 95 on my pentium laptop with all the files copied to the hard disk takes 45 minuets, on this machine it 95 takes well over an hour and a half to install and is a swap zombie before it even boots

Re:this is a hack?

[blanchae]

I've installed Linux onto a 386SX laptop with 4 MB RAM and a 20 MB hard-drive back in the early 2000s using Slackware. I got X windows to run but very slowly. It was a great learning experience as to find out what the bare minimum software is required to get it running.

Re:this is a hack?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Perhaps we just have a different perspective on history.

Every properly-configured 386SX/DX board I ran across worked fine, whether big-name OEM or aftermarket...except for one strange AMD 386SX/40 board I had which had issues with DMA.

Definitely a different perspective, on history to - I dealt with companies that would ask what chipset you'd like on the motherboards *cough* PC Chips *cough* - you could literally buy any chipsets you wanted - problem was it was just sticky labels not actual chipsets, the company I worked for was the first manufacturer to sell a machine running a 386 chipset - and early motherboards had an extremely high failure rate. It wasn't until the end of '85 (when Minix was released, nearly a year after we'd had the first CPU that we shipped a working machine. By the late 80's there was so many problems with fake chips that UMC stopped making them under their own name. For the record - no-one had run Linux on a 386 (or any other chip) prior to Sept '91, by which time the AMD 386 had already changed Intels game (I recall them stalling on the first 484s 'cause suddenly qc counted).

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, that's nothing! I still have books.

Re:this is a hack?

[matfud]

Oh you had the joy of installing from 70 odd floppy disks too. I'm glad I was not the only one to suffer. Enough to make me buy a 2x CD rom :) for £220. It did come with an interface card though. My sound card did not support it.

Re:this is a hack?

[Bungie]

You should try and install smartdrv.exe (the MS-DOS disk cache driver) onto the boot floppy. I don't know 100% for sure if the Windows 95 installation is affected, but Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 installations started from MS-DOS were incredibly slow to copy the files if smartdrv.exe wasn't loaded (the file copy phase of the installation would take at least three times as long).

Another thing that makes Windows 95 into a swap zombie is if the disk controllers are loaded in 16-bit compatabiliy mode. IIRC under origional Windows 95 (not as much under OSR2), a lot of laptops had this issue because it didn't include many chipset drivers. Even common Intel chipsets will have performance issues until you install the proper chipset software.

Of course it could also be caused by a variety of hardware related issues...

For example, I've installed Windows 95 on 486's with 8MB of RAM and had decent performance, yet an IBM Aptiva with a Pentium II and 128MB of RAM struggles and seems to perform worse. The Aptiva used an ALi IDE chipset which was really slow and IBM paired it with a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive which was also really slow due to it's large platter size.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

That was my first distro and I bought on CD. Yggdrasil was very good at the time, it came with the "Bible" contains all the man pages which was very helpful when you have never used Linux before. I remember walking around campus with it and people thought I was in some weird cult religion. Ha Ha. I installed it on my Packard Bell 386SX-20 w/ 8MB of RAM, Proaudio Spectrum 16 Pro sound(which had way better sound than SoundBlaster at the time) and a Cirrus Logic 5320 1MB. X windows worked very well and I was able to watch video files which other distros had a hard time doing, or at least the packages weren't compiled in by default. I later switched to Slackware 3.2 then RedHat 5.3. I've been running RedHat/Fedora ever since minus some dabbling with other distros.

Recently I converted all of my old CDs and floppies to ISOs and images and installed all my old distros in VMWare Workstation.

I recommend everyone convert your old CDs before they become unreadable. I barely got mine converted before they started giving me errors. Good luck trying to find them again.

Now if only someone would come out with a proper 386 and 486 emulator.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah and it doesn't work on Commodore 64's either.

Re:this is a hack?

[Hognoxious]

So now finding an old distro is news worthy?

Obviously yes, because that's exactly what I said, word for word, in three different languages.

Moron.

Re:this is a hack?

[eharvill]

I bought 16MB (I think) of RAM for an insane price back in 1994/95. I figured out how to make a RAM drive and copy the quake directory over to it. Instead of the normal 45-60 seconds of watching the dots go across the screen to load up Quake, it took about 5 seconds to load the game. I was quite impressed with myself at the time.

Re:this is a hack?

[Bungie]

Yeah I've had to do Debian installs in 4MB of RAM and it sucks. You needed a special boot floppy with a custom built kernel and minimal install interface that can fit into that 4MB of space effectively. It didn't run too badly but I had a larger hard disk (and thus a lot of swap space as well). I couldn't imagine having to also deal with a 40MB hard disk!

But I agree, there is a huge leap in performance when you move from 4MB to 8MB of RAM and you don't have to fiddle around with things as much.

You may also find it interesting that Windows 95 installed a specially built kernel if you had 4MB of RAM. If you had more than 4MB it copied over the regular version. Apparently Microsoft also found it difficult to get Windows to work in 4MB of RAM, but 8MB was no problem at all.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but to some people using Linux automatically makes them a hacker, so installing Linux must be a super hack in the first place!! These people also think installing Linux makes them immune to all exploits and malware and will get them girls.

Re:this is a hack?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Windows XP installed from DOS will also yell at you if smartdrv.exe isn't loaded.

Re:this is a hack?

[Linuxmonger]

Newbie! I have a couple spools of wire for a wire recorder in the garage, I have an Osborn Executive with a Z80 processor and 5" amber screen. It still boots CPM. I have an ancient Eagle 5MB drive pack that we use as a cake pan!

Re:this is a hack?

[arisvega]

Especially given the price I can pick up industrial single card 386-SX boards

Why are you mentioning the price? Even if you buy hundreds, the electric billing is going to cost you dearly; those chips need much more electricity to do much less work than modern chips.

Besides the 'just for the f*ck of it' argument, what is the point of using said hardware and, in particular, lots of it?

Re:this is a hack?

[adolf]

From my side: The aftermarket world was a strange soup back then. We didn't have ASUS and eVGA and Gigabyte to blame for our woes: We just bought whatever board we could get our hands on (whether at a swap-meet or from the back pages of Computer Shopper) and were happy with that (or not).

PC Chips-based boards were always a curse. I'm glad to have not run across them recently.

That said: In 1985 I was still cutting my teeth on a combination of TRS-80 Model I and VIC-20. It wasn't until '88 that I got my fingers into an 8088. I'll get off your lawn now...

Re:this is a hack?

[houstonbofh]

Like I said... Non-pc. I also have 2 DEC RA-50 disk packs with RSTS/e on them. Now I will have nightmares.

Rainy day

[Jack Malmostoso]

Considering how shite this summer's weather has been in central Europe, we would have had time to install gentoo from Stage 1 on a 386.

Re:Rainy day

[Murdoch5]

That would take longer then the entire summer and most likely fall.

Re:Rainy day

[Rich0]

Interesting you mention Gentoo - that is one of the few distros that I'd expect to work fairly well on an i386, since it is built from source.

You'd need to find something to boot off of that contained wget, fdisk, etc, but once that is done you should be able to do just fine. Or, you could just rebuild the install media/etc for i386.

Getting it started would be the only painful part - once you're up and running with an i386 toolchain you should in theory be able to install anything you want. Of course, you'd have to have a pretty minimal install anyway to fit within the RAM constraints on any i386 motherboard.

Re:Rainy day

[larppaxyz]

Do you have any idea how long it would take to just compile kernel on 386sx and 4MB of memory? My guess would be something around 6-10 days and it would be almost impossible with 120MB HD. Oh, and i really would like to see how that old HD would bang swap partition while compiling with that amount of RAM :)

Re:Rainy day

[Forty Two Tenfold]

Do you realize that you can compile for the target architecture on different machine?

Re:Rainy day

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

I'd definetly go with Gentoo myself, of course you could cross-compile on a more modern box, at least to build the kernel and toolchain.

Re:Rainy day

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use distcc to offload compilation to a stronger machine. I installed gentoo on an old linksys nas that way.

Re:Rainy day

[Anonymous Coward]

That would take longer then the entire summer and most likely fail.

FTFY

Re:Rainy day

[John Courtland]

Back in the early 2000's I built kernel 2.0.36 on a 1994-era 40MHz 486DLC (shitty TI/Cyrix chip) w/ 12MB of RAM and it took about 10 hours. The AMD 386 my dad bought in like 1995 was also 40MHz and would stomp that 486 piece of garbage. I bet if you could find a high end 386 w/ 12MB of fastpage it would take about the same amount of time.

Re:Rainy day

[Bert64]

Nothing to stop you fitting a much larger HDD to a 386, the BIOS won't handle it but Linux shouldn't have any trouble.

Also, there's always distcc for speeding up the compile, or just compile on a faster machine and copy the bins.... It's relatively easy to make a chroot for gentoo and then compile everything in it with 386 cpuflags, the resulting binaries will run just fine on newer hardware.

Re:Rainy day

[spaceyhackerlady]

My first Linux box was a 486/66 that originally came with 4 MB of RAM, but I upgraded it to 32 MB. It compiled kernel 2.0.36 in a couple of hours. I started my thesis work on it, but got a used Pentium motherboard along the way and finished it on a Pentium 233MMX. Which I still have.

...laura

Re:Rainy day

[IrquiM]

Did you forget to push the turbo button?

Re:Rainy day

[Demonoid-Penguin]

Do you have any idea how long it would take to just compile kernel on 386sx and 4MB of memory? My guess would be something around 6-10 days and it would be almost impossible with 120MB HD. Oh, and i really would like to see how that old HD would bang swap partition while compiling with that amount of RAM :)

My grand-daughter loves my old laptop- it's an IBM Thinkpad 380D - it's Debian built from source but no way did I compile it on that machine.

Re:Rainy day

[Anonymous Coward]

That would take longer than the entire summer and most likely fail.

FTFY.

Slashdot- home to the smartest idiots on the planet.

Re:Rainy day

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

When I did, it went into plaid.

Re:Rainy day

[houstonbofh]

Yeah, but once you are done, it would make the ultimate seed box!

Re:Rainy day

[Firehawke]

Shit, I wouldn't even call a Cryix a 486. Like you said, higher end 386s tore those things to shreds. A guy I knew back in highschool had one, and it had a notorious chipset defect that caused it to semi-randomly scramble floppy writes under certain conditions.

Re:Rainy day

[MightyMartian]

Nothing like that long. I was custom-compiling kernels under Slackware 3 on a 486SX with 8mb of RAM in about 2 hours. I'd wager as long as you pruned off a good deal of the hardware support that comes with the new kernels you could do the compile in less than a day.

Re:Rainy day

[Anonymous Coward]

That would take longer then the entire summer and most likely fail.

FTFY

THAN. It astounds me that people who understand regexes stumble on simple, plain English.

Re:Rainy day

[yuhong]

I think the problem was the motherboard DMA was not aware of the internal cache inside the Cyrix, since it was a 386 motherboard.

Re:Rainy day

[volkerdi]

Do you have any idea how long it would take to just compile kernel on 386sx and 4MB of memory?

Seems to me that it was well under an hour. 386sx/16 with 4MB is the exact specs I used for my first year of Linux hacking, and I got along OK. My machine had one of the lowest recorded BogoMIPS ever (I think it was like 5).

Been meaning to boot that again... had it out to look last month. Maybe I should do a benchmark and report back.

Why not LFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not Linux from Scratch? http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

Re:Why not LFS?

[BrokenHalo]

I have gone down the path of LFS, mostly by way of setting up a very specialised system. I definitely wouldn't bother with it for a desktop box, since life is just too short to subject yourself to the workload of effectively maintaining your own distribution.

However, a simple approach to getting Linux running on a 386 might be to simply download one of the slightly older Slackware ISOs. I haven't checked the most recent offerings since I migrated to Arch, but IIRC it wasn't that long ago (1-2 years?) that Slack was offering 386 binaries as standard.

I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[carlhaagen]

The Linux kernel and the GNU userland is afterall i386, is it not? Up until just recently I had a long-running OpenBSD system on an old P75 with 64mb of RAM. It wasn't until just last year OpenBSD/i386 actually started requiring a 486.

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[Osgeld]

nothing supports the 386 anymore, maybe net bsd if you have 16 megs to boot it

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[Anonymous Coward]

nothing supports the 386 anymore, maybe net bsd if you have 16 megs to boot it

So all those i386 distributions that you can get (Fedora, Debian, etc) don't run on the i386 platform? That's fucked up!

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Actually, Debain is still (only) i386.

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[Osgeld]

no they require a minimum of a 486, for example the last debian that works on a 386 is potato (2.2)

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[Osgeld]

debian states in a dozen places on their webstite that i386 requires a 486 cpu

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[Anonymous Coward]

No, gcc defaults for debian is march=i586 since mid-2010. See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=609690

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Didn't realize that. I assumed that being marked "i386" meant it was i386. Silly me.

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[Osgeld]

welcome to linux

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[John Courtland]

i386 simply means it requires a 32-bit mode

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[houstonbofh]

So all those i386 distributions that you can get (Fedora, Debian, etc) don't run on the i386 platform?

i386 is a platform and 80386sx or 80386dx is a CPU. And that CPU does not have the advanced instruction sets from the 80486 CPU that is now required. Just like the mainstream Nvidia driver no longer supports Gforce2 cards.

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[houstonbofh]

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2378254&cid=37079672 i386 is a platform and 80386sx or 80386dx is a CPU. And that CPU does not have the advanced instruction sets from the 80486 CPU that is now required. Just like the mainstream Nvidia driver no longer supports Gforce2 cards.

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[Midnight Thunder]

Not really. There were probably additions to the instruction set that most software now depends on. Given the lack of a market for the 386 and that almost no developer has one anymore, there is very little reason to target such a system.

Re:I can't figure out why this is remarkable

[Midnight Thunder]

no they require a minimum of a 486, for example the last debian that works on a 386 is potato (2.2)

Was this an Aperture Industries potato?

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is why? When you can get much more processing power at less dollar and energy cost from installing Linux on a hacked/rooted old smart phone, ereader, and yes even router.

Re:Why?

[snowgirl]

Because it's AWESOME!

Re:Why?

[Gadget_Guy]

It is a geek thing. We wonder if you could run a website from a Commodore 64 (I will be nice and not link to that one), a two-axis panning time lapse rig built from Lego, or build a nuclear reactor. You don't need a practical purpose to do these things. The point is to see if they can be done.

Now I have to agree with the first poster that installing an old version Linux on a 386 doesn't rank too high on the scale of these sorts of things. It would be interesting just to remind us how far things have progressed since then.

I have to admit I have an installation of Windows 3.1 running on DOSBox for this very reason. But that is not too hardcore either. Much more amazing is the fact that I know someone who still actively uses their Windows 3.1 system as their only computer. When you see how capable Word 6 was, it shows that things haven't improved a great deal in the word processing world in all that time.

Re:Why?

[jones_supa]

And yet some people's hobby are vintage cars too, even though you could get more MPG from newer stuff...

Re:Why?

[Demonoid-Penguin]

The question is why? When you can get much more processing power at less dollar and energy cost from installing Linux on a hacked/rooted old smart phone, ereader, and yes even router.

Because the same hardware that chugs with Win98SE running an antivirus and a decent firewall, even when NLited - but can be pretty responsive when running modern true-32-bit software. "Leverage new life out of old hardware with new software". This post is being made on an IBM T22 Thinkpad running Squeeze KDE. I don't have plasma effects or widgets enabled (nor do I want them). But this processor and 256MB of RAM won't run anything useful and modern using the software of it's era - for most tasks it's just as quick as my 6 month-old high-end 2GB RAM laptop - which runs Windoof 7. Except power on to useable is 8 seconds, shutdown is 5 seconds (guess which OS does that).

Disclaimer: once Windoof 7 has been around for a few more years there'll be more way to trim the fat - but I'll never have the ability to do that at source code level, and it's not in the companies interests to release performance patches.

By all means *you* go buy the latest hardware every year - if it does what you want, then more power to you. But if your 2GB of sub-light speed RAM, dual-core 64-bit 3GHz machine with it's SATA hdd can't do anything useful quicker than my sub 1GHz single-core 32-bit processor with 256MB of PC100 dragging an IDE drive.... hey you do the math - you help the economy, I'll watch my wallet and my power bill.

Though really it's just about building things - gives me more joy than acquiring things.
Sad really.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know all this. You know trivia down to the chip level. Yet you don't know that it's means IT IS. Baffling.

Re:Why?

[im_thatoneguy]

It is a geek thing. We wonder if you could run a website from a Commodore 64 (I will be nice and not link to that one), a two-axis panning time lapse rig built from Lego, or build a nuclear reactor. You don't need a practical purpose to do these things. The point is to see if they can be done.

I disagree completely. All of those things are things which *shouldn't* be possible but are. That shows the adventurous spirit to explore the unknown.

Installing Linux on a 386 is more akin to restoring a 1990 Huffy kids bike to mint condition. The path is obvious, we know it can be done and the reward is stupid since you're restoring crap back to its original state.

When I hear someone built a nuclear reactor in their kitchen I go "Whoa cool!" when I hear someone installed linux on their old computer I think "Isn't that the point of linux?"

Beware the price of IDE drives

[Anonymous Coward]

AKA PATA drives. Their price has jumped and they are getting scarce.
I just checked Microcenter and they had only one type and it was about $110.

It could be fun, but don't invest much cash.

Re:Beware the price of IDE drives

[Osgeld]

compact flash and a ide adapter, you dont need a 40 gigger on something like this

Re:Beware the price of IDE drives

[houstonbofh]

Find a local Computer Recycler. These guys are local to me. http://www.compurecyclers.com/ You can get a box of IDE drives for the cost of lunch. Also, lots of old hardware, and hard to find memory.

Re:Beware the price of IDE drives

[JackDW]

That'll be really, really slow. Unlike an SSD a CF card won't do intelligent management of writing, so every time the OS writes a block to the "disk", a huge number of blocks will be erased and rewritten. So you would need to use a rather contrived arrangement, such as a read-only root filesystem with /tmp in RAM, or the entire root filesystem in RAM. On an old machine with very little RAM, this will be tricky.

I'd suggest an PATA to SATA adapter to enable the use of a modern hard disk.

Re:Beware the price of IDE drives

[Osgeld]

if its going into a 386 I doubt you would care about its speed

But...

[eexaa]

...but does it (still) run linux?

Re:But...

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand that sometimes it is difficult to read the summary. To answer your question: yes.

Re:But...

[Midnight Thunder]

Well this is the million monkies. Any computing hardware could be made to run Linux, given enough crazy code monkies, though the Babbage Machine would probably be pushing it ;)

ELKS Linux on Laptops with 286CPU

[wehe]

There are even a few installation reports for ELKS Linux on laptops with 286 CPUs.

Use LFS or similar...

[dermoth666]

I did pretty much that to install a linux distro on a 486 laptop - I compiled the kernel, libraries, etc. - then built a bootdisk and filesystem. I then went on and copied the ~15m filesystem using a bunch of floppies (no network) one disk at a time after booting from the floppy, and finally installed the bootloader.

The Linux From Scratch HOWTO has all instructions for it, although in my case I diverted a little bit from it - for instance I used uClibc instead of Glibc and a 2.2 kernel. Doing it from scratch gives you the best way to select more recent components for some parts while using smaller/older ones elsewhere, so you don't end up with a totally outdated system.

Hack?

[KingRobot]

I feel dated, I mean, "back in the day" this was how you used a machine like this...

Re:Hack?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

No kidding. I remember mounting the hard drive and a tape drive on the boot floppy.

Re:Hack?

[Midnight Thunder]

That is nothing. Back in the day we were using punch cards.

Re:Hack?

[theVarangian]

I feel dated, I mean, "back in the day" this was how you used a machine like this...

Brings back memories doesn't it?

Stuck on step 12 of the Red Hat Linux installation process because the slick new GUI dialog is bigger than your tiny display causing the OK button to be off the screen and no amount of blind keyboard navigation will allow you to continue.

Curses...

Reboot and switch to Text mode installation....

It installs....

Now figure out which jumpers to set on the Sound Blaster 16 board to get it working...

After a lot of head scratching you figure out that for some strange reason the volume is turned down so low by default you can't hear the test sound... crank up the volume and you finally hear the magic words: "Hello. This is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux, Linux."

Now fire up an editor and rewrite the default X11 config file to get the display card up and running...

Hoping nothing gets fried... Phew!... everything seems OK.

Lather, rinse, repeat...

Fire up X11... Yeeeeehaaaa!!! SUCESS!!! ***More*** than 16 crappy colors.

Fast forward a few more days...

Your computer is finally in something resembling a usable condition.

Been there, done that....

[Anonymous Coward]

6-10 days?

I don't think it was that long, but it certainly seemed like eternity!

Now get off my lawn.......

wrong distro

[pngwen]

Shoulda used gentoo. If gcc can compile for it, gentoo can do it! Plus it would have been a hack too, as all gentoo boxen are hacks!

And yes, I run gentoo on all my machines and have done so since 2003. (My first gentoo box was in 2002, the rest of my machines were converted a year later.)

Re:wrong distro

[IrquiM]

True - wrong distro - just install slackware, and be happy with it! No need to compile everything!

Still got a functioning 486DX4 with slackware 3.5 installed on it. Works like a charm!

Re:wrong distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine how fast it would have run with all the optimization, too!

Re:wrong distro

[Anonymous Coward]

I could be wrong, but ISTR slackware moving from 386 to 486 about 5 years back, which would mean you have to recompile everything or stick with an ancient version like you did.

Nothing wrong with ancient versions, if they do what you want, but it's important to be aware of years' worth of unpatched vulnerabilities -- if you use it on the public internet, you probably need to compile an assortment of packages from newer or patched source.

Re:wrong distro

[gl4ss]

well.. if installing it takes hours and hours.. re-compiling it would have taken a lot of time. and a lot of hd space too, just for the compilers. some embedded distro would've been better choice - and/or compiling the stuff on some more powerful box.

thing with distros though is that modern distros have so much stuff that the 386 era machine can't handle even the package manager without going to swap-meet from hell.

Re:wrong distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but trying to compile a fully functional system on a 386 processor would be a nightmare. I remember doing a Stage 1 install around 2003 or so, on a then new 64bit Athlon at around 2GHz, and it took the better part of 2 days to compile the system, X, xfce, Firefox, and OpenOffice. So I hope you have the better part of a year to compile all that on a 20MHz 386.

Difficulties of 386 support

[Anonymous Coward]

As the author of the referenced article pointed out, many/most distros dropped support for the 386 some time ago. IIRC from the discussions on the NetBSD mailing list, a lot of this had to do with the bloat required to support 386-specific workarounds which were not an issue for the 486 and later chips. There was some discussion of handing it with conditional defines and/or separate ports, but it came down to the level of code obfuscation (from the conditionals) vs. the number of real users.

Re:Difficulties of 386 support

[Anonymous Coward]

This does not make sense to me. It is my understanding that all of the x86 chips shared a common underlying instruction set. Given that, two questions: Why would 386 not be supported if 486 is? Why would 386 have a bunch of workarounds that later ones in the line did not require?

Re:Difficulties of 386 support

[anss123]

The 486 has a few extra instructions that are helpful for multitasking IIRC. Windows 98 dropped 386 support for that reason.

Re:Difficulties of 386 support

[SuricouRaven]

Each generation of chips got a few more instructions, but was always capable of running code compiled for it's predecessors. Not vice versa. This is why you will often see modern chips refered to as i686, to distinguish them from the 'pure' i386. There are also many multimedia-targeted SIMD instruction set addons like MMX, SSE1-4 and such. They are useful to be aware of, as some of them depend on having data 16-byte aligned - knowing this means you can write code that an optimising compiler can use them on.

Re:Difficulties of 386 support

[Nimey]

Come now, that's not the only reason. Windows /3.1/ was slow on a 386, and how much RAM could you reasonably expect a 386 board to support?

Re:Difficulties of 386 support

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I understand: So it is like when you learn math and each processor is like a different grade level. They each add different operations that each person can do. Earlier grades can only count. Later grades can do exponents and variables etc. as well as count. Its just sometimes faster to multiply in your head than count, but if you wanted to back-port (or whatever it is called) to an earlier grade, you could but it is a lot of work.

Re:Difficulties of 386 support

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran Win 3.11 on a 386 just fine. You're a lying sack of shit and a dumb cunt. Go fuck yourself in the ass with a baseball bat. You just suck a cock when it comes to computing.

Re:Difficulties of 386 support

[Nimey]

ror

Re:Difficulties of 386 support

[Osgeld]

lol I remember when I first installed windows 3.11 on a 386, it sucked 34 out of 40 megs of space, ran slow as shit and did nothing useful, I went back to my stack of dos crap that made that 40 meg MFM drive seem like a endless cavern

Re:Difficulties of 386 support

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, no! That analogy is all wrong, it has to involve a car and not be helpful at all.

why is this here

[Anonymous Coward]

Whats next? An article about breathing?

Old software installed on old computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Film at eleven. Seriously, what is the interest here? 1997 era software on a 386sx? What is the big deal?

Re:Old software installed on old computer

[couchslug]

For people who never dealt with that hardware and those distros, it's educational.

We can TELL them "we were so poor that if we didn't wake up on Christmas Day with a hardon we got nothing to play with", but that
isn't the technotactile experience of actually using the gear.

An emulator is nice, but not the same.

Been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CIUyM6GTmU

My old 386sx16 booting Slackware with a 2.0.35 kernel

Slackware 2.0.35 seems to be the way to go.

Compiler Technology

[TejWC]

I was wondering, hypothetically, if somebody where to take the source code of Debian 1.3.1 and compile it with the latest version of GCC and somehow made it compile; I wonder how much faster it will compared to the binary that was released back then. I mean, has compiler technology improved much in the last 14 years when it comes to slow machines like the i386?

Re:Compiler Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends where you want to run that binary. if you're comparing the old binary to a newly generated one and are running it on a modern system, it should be faster. If you tried to compile on gcc for an old system, well that's another story. They tend to do optimizations for the current chips out at the time of the gcc release. They also tend to favor intel chips slightly.

Re:Compiler Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that the 80386 was in production until late 2007 for embedded systems, I'd imagine it has.

Re:Compiler Technology

[eclectro]

>Considering that the 80386 was in production until late 2007 for embedded systems, I'd imagine it has.

And why this might be quite relevant despite the some of the disparaging remarks in the comments here.

Re:Compiler Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

It wouldn't surprise me if performance regressed for certain targets.

Re:Compiler Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be really interesting to see. I'm not sure it would all compile though depending what compiler they used back then.

Re:Compiler Technology

[thegarbz]

I mean, has compiler technology improved much in the last 14 years when it comes to slow machines like the i386?

I don't think so. The large majority of new compiler efficiencies comes from taking advantage of features in modern processors. The processors have newer instructions that can do certain things more effectively.

Think of it like this, you have a basic microprocessor such as an AVR and you're trying to do a simple floating point calculation like multiplication. The compiler can only get so much efficiency out of the processor but if it doesn't know how to do math on a floating point then additional instructions need to be given to work out the solution (on an AVR enabling floating point can take up 20% of the available program memory with just a few simple calculations).

Now supposing you had an FPU, the entire thing boils down to a handful of instructions which basically take the memory address, pass it to the FPU, and tell it which instruction to carry out.

These efficiencies were introduced in processors (16bit, 32bit, and 64bit processing, MMX, SSE, SSE2 etc) and each new compiler was designed to take advantage of those. If you dropped a new compiler on an old chip you'd lose all those features.

Re:Compiler Technology

[Anonymous Coward]

It probably wouldn't be a hugely dramatic difference, as most of the advances in modern compilers are ways to maximize the benefit of modern processor features (cache, out of order execution, etc.) which a 386 simply doesn't have. The simpler CPUs of the time were rather easier to optimize for.

Re:Compiler Technology

[Siffy]

This may be of some interest to you. http://wtf.hijacked.us/wiki/index.php/Rocket.txt It's unfortunately not a full comparison of every major GCC version, but there are a few comparisons showing exactly what you suggest. Obviously it isn't scientific. Just a friend's site where I have a few boxes recorded and had the link quickly available.

I'd like to see that too. Slowest machine I think I have anymore is a Pentium 1. Now, if only it weren't the sole machine around here with a floppy drive for making boot disks. :/ But it's plenty slow. Last time I tried, it took about 2 hours just to compile a kernel on the box.

Floppies????

[jsimon12]

Why didn't the guy just make the stack of install floppies like we used to do back in the day? Or break out his PCMCIA SCSI card (still have one along with a single speed SCSI CD)

Re:Floppies????

[Chewbacon]

Floppies? Is that SATA3? Or is that like a new MP3 player?

moores law has gone too far

[Anonymous Coward]

now that 1.6ghz processors, 1gb RAM and 160GB hard drives are considered "low-end" netbook specs, it is so surpising to hear about old software taking up so little.

This is nothing!

[Scholasticus]

I installed Linux on a vellum codex! I even included X11, but went with Xfce instead of GNOME 3. It's sweet, man ... very illuminated.

Re:This is nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

x11 you say?

I remember when make world on my box took 40-ish hours.

Re:This is nothing!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't get that scroll working with a four fingered slide.....

Grrrr

OpenBSD

[Billly Gates]

The issue is the bloated glibc libraries eat up all the ram.

The libc ones in OpenBSD use much less memory and the system is less intensive. BSD init is much leaner as well. If I were bored I would install a BSD OS on such a beast and would not even consider Linux unless old 2001 era libc 5 is being used.

Re:OpenBSD

[arth1]

You have the choice of three different C libraries for Linux, glibc, eglibc, and uclibc. Especially eglibc is interesting as it strives to be as glibc compatible as possible.

I'm really thinking of converting my mail/dns/nis server to eglibc. It's a Pentium IIIs, which means it can only handle 512 MB (there's no PIIIs compatible motherboard that can do more). Why I keep it is because it's really power frugal, and because I don't look forward to converting six ATA drives to SATA.

Re:OpenBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

You have the choice of three different C libraries for Linux, glibc, eglibc, and uclibc. Especially eglibc is interesting as it strives to be as glibc compatible as possible.

You won't gain anything by using eglibc. It's mainly the build process that has been improved. The rest of the sourcecode has been taken from glibc.

I'm really thinking of converting my mail/dns/nis server to eglibc. It's a Pentium IIIs, which means it can only handle 512 MB (there's no PIIIs compatible motherboard that can do more).

Take a look at i820 and i840 boards.

Re:OpenBSD

[arth1]

Take a look at i820 and i840 boards.

From my understanding, they don't support the Tualatin-S. The i815P (despite having a lower number, it's newer) had the necessary changes to work with the PIII-S CPU and its pin reassignments.

The PIII-S was a marvelous CPU for its time. Intel pretty much killed it because it made the P4 look bad - an 1.4 GHz PIII-S would outperform a 2 GHz P4 equipped with twice as fast RAM, producing a fraction of the heat. The III-S then got revived again as the -M series, which became the foundation for the Core CPUs. Thankfully, gone are the days of the P4 family, with its ridiculously long pipeline and high wattage for the computing power they provided.

Heh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting this on a not so old PC with antiX (i486) for future use on a very particular netbook.

Anyway, my suggestion: distrowatch, search (old computers, based on Debian, not based on Ubuntu, i386) yields 37 alternatives. Check for language support, desktops availabel, offered apps etc.

For me, the i486 criterion led to antiX (still under testing, but seems very good). Maybe the best distros for i586, i486 and i386 are all different! IMHO the desktop plays a major role, since apps are easily fetched from Debian repos. See if what you prefer is offered.

Ubuntu is directed towards i686 (maybe i586, too)... that's why I explicitly excluded it (but I have hopes that Unity comes to be rather good e.g. for touchscreens).

Re:Heh...

[healyp]

Yea, I had to exclude ubuntu as well when I was picking a distro for an AT&T Globalyst 380TPC I was trying to get running, a 486 as well. Free/OpenBSD wouldn't install but NetBSD did, 5.1 the current version even.

Ill do one better

[nurb432]

Ill install OS/2 from the original floppies on a PS/2 model 80. ya, that will show them!

WTF? and why do we care?

Re:Ill do one better

[zhazam]

Because it's interesting to see how people get hardware running when relevant information disappears, compatibility breaks, and software in general marches on.

Re:Ill do one better

[nurb432]

The problem is he was using period software on period hardware. I don't see a huge deal with it.

Us fans of retro hardware do this all the time and we don't think its 'special'.

Re:Ill do one better

[Osgeld]

the article was not targeted at you

Thanks for the (bad) memories.

[gukin]

Oh the time we wasted on those old, hideously expensive machines. The hours I wasted trying to get our application to run on a customers old hardware. The worst was a 386 with 2 Meg of ram and a tiny hard disk. He insisted we use that machine because it was still working and he didn't want to shell out the $1500 for a new 486 with 16 Meg of RAM. I couldn't make it work, the disk had errors and the machine was a POS Packard Bell with some intermittent problems.

He finally paid for the $1500 for the 486 but shortly destroyed everything trying to dual boot win95. Heck even Win95 hated 486 or weaker machines.

Re:Thanks for the (bad) memories.

[Anonymous Coward]

I ran Win95 and also Win98 on old 486 DX2, although I was blessed with 32Mb or 64Mb or RAM. Win95 release 1 was very empty, but ran OK. I remember the novelty of USB devices on early Pentium devices, and remember motherboards that had both AT and ATX connectors, as well as the strange insistence on matching RAM pairs.
Good memories.

Why is this remarkable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it remarkable to install debian 1.3.1 which was released around 1997 on a 386?

I mean i would be impressed if it were some more recent version of the kernel and userland.
But i guess for that you would need Gentoo or LFS (which would probably take days if you dont use a different PC for Compiling).

Dune 2

[Krneki]

If you manage to make it run, you should try Dune 2. It's a revolutionary game.

Re:Dune 2

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are running Dune 2 ... awesome game I may add ... then install FreeDOS as it is Dos based. That game did have issues on my friends 386 and some settings had to be turned down to run. I had a 486 and it ran awesome on that.

It was a pain in the as in that I needed to run Dos 6 memmaker because the program used too much expanded ram at the expense of the extended ram to run games like Doom. God Dos was such a POS

SX is 100% compatible with DX

[perpenso]

Why a hack?

Because it's not a DX chip (full 32-bit). It won't work "out of the box" ...

The SX is 100% compatible with the DX from a software perspective. IIRC modern Linux distributions do not work out of the box because they are compiled to use PentiumPro (sort of a 686 - three generations ahead of the 386) instructions.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[bmo]

An SX chip is merely a 386 without the floating point coprocessor.

SX machines came with an "overdrive chip" socket, which was just a full 386 with math coprocessor. It was a way for Intel to sell 386s that had defective floating point.

When faced with a machine without a math coprocessor, Linux compiled for 386 will do "math coprocessor emulation" if you build it.

http://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/MATH_EMULATION.html

--
BMO

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[volkerdi]

An SX chip is merely a 386 without the floating point coprocessor.

Actually, the 386SX has a reduced data path width compared with the DX, but both could use an external 387 math coprocessor. It was not built in to any 386 CPU.

I had a 387 in my AMD 386DX-40 box... that was a great system. Pretty much stuck with AMD ever since, with a few exceptions.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[Anonymous Coward]

No you are wrong. 386sx was 32-bit but had a 16-bit bus. The 386dx had a 32 bit bus. The math coprocessor was the 387 for both chips. The 486sx is the one that had no math co-pro, while the 486dx did have one. The 486 was indeed 32 bit all the way through.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[hal2814]

You're confusing the 386 with the 486. Neither the 386SX nor the 386DX had a built-in math coprocessor. The math coprocessor didn't even exist yet when the 386DX (originally just called the 386) was launched. The difference between 386SX and 386DX was that the former only had a 16-bit data bus while the latter had a 32-bit one. The difference between the 486SX and 486DX was the DX's inclusion of a math coprocessor. The SX of each was the lesser processor but for different reasons.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[bmo]

Gah, ok, i misremembered.

Old timer's disease.

--
BMO

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[JSG]

So what the hell was the (80)287 that I bought for my 286 to run AutoCAD then?

I know it had "Maths Coprocessor" written on the box and it cost ~£120 - bargain!

Also I seem to remember that the SX/DX thing actually came in with the 486 and was back ported.

Cheers
Jon

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[drolli]

Ouch. Uninformed.

and SX had a 16 bit data *bus* and AFAIR an restricted adress bus (it could not adress 4GB physical memory).

and DX was 32 bit also on the physical data bus.

it had no coprocessor on chip (that was the 387, to be bought separately)

in contrast the 486SX was a 486DX with a disabled (broken AFAIR) coprocessor

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[SScorpio]

I not sure if I had a 387, but I also had a AMD 386DX-40 and that was a great chip. Sadly newer games required a 486 and wouldn't run on it anymore.

Years later I kept the case and floppy drives but upgraded the guts. I have a 486DX-33 in a 586/686 board with 32MB of RAM. It has a real Sound Blaster 16 and it is a great machine for old gaming. Sadly I haven't booted it in a while since DOSBox does the job now.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[Anonymous Coward]

I have at least 2 of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_8087

I have 2 Micronics 386 motherboards with 287 math co-pro sockets (Autocad would NOT run without a math co-pro ... grrrr...)

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[DNS-and-BIND]

The 80287 was a separate chip from the 80286. To be fair, back then nobody needed math coprocessors. Unless you were running CAD or scientific applications, they were irrelevant and never used.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[hal2814]

Sorry, that wasn't terribly clear. The 387 coprocessor didn't exist until after the 386 was already being sold.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[Anonymous Coward]

+4 Insightful for total bollocks. Good job mods, were you all born in 90s?

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[Hognoxious]

Does drawing fractals count?

I remember when the standard was a 6 or 8 MHz 8086. And then we got one solitary 386 machine with a 387 in our department.

The time to do a Mandelbrot set (at whatever res the Hercules mono card was - about 700 x 400?) went down from overnight to a lunchtime.

Now get off my lawn!

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone stop to look this information up or is this just a big pissing contest of I know more than you?
http://www.belarus.net/Intel/MUSEUM/techspec.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[PhotoJim]

Modern Debian runs fine on a 486DX (and worked fine on the same system while it was still a 486SX, a year ago). I'm not certain that many Linux distros will install from scratch on a 486 today but the system has taken upgrades successfully over the past six years. The only accommodation I've made (primarily to accommodate its modest RAM - 32 MB, good for the era but not by today's standards) is to compile a custom kernel.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[Anonymous Coward]

A math coprocessor did exist and was called i387. Intel even offered a mathco for XT class machines with the 8087. It just wasn't integrated in with the cpu until the 486.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[Anonymous Coward]

The math coprocessor didn't even exist yet when the 386DX (originally just called the 386) was launched.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this, but math coprocessors did exist a long time before 386 was published - back to 8087 (published in 1980, it seems), and others even well before that (ISTR there was an coprocessor from AMD available for either i8080 or Z80).

In the strict sense you're correct in that that 387 was released approx one year after 386, so early 386 boards were built with sockets for 287 coprocessor.

Source: cpu-collection.de

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[Anonymous Coward]

This is correct. I first installed Linux on a 386SX. It had the 16-bit data bus, and I eventually bought the math coprocessor to help speed up some physics simulations. I used a slackware version. When debian came out, it would never easily install on this 386sx. I used slackware to play with debian to get it going on the 386sx. I last used this machine to play doom during y2k. I find this article hilarious.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[CompMD]

The math coprocessor did exist in the time of the 386, it was just a separate chip (80387) and fairly rare. I've never actually seen one. However, I do still have an IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 with a genuine Intel 80287XL mathco in my basement.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[Anonymous Coward]

The 486sx was the chip where the math co-processor failed quality control. The co-processor for this was an actual 486dx which worked and when inserted turned off the 486sx.

Sort of...

[HalAtWork]

The "hack" is doing it under an hour. He used a different PC to install it onto the IDE disk and afterwards put it back into the laptop. It's a little more convoluted than you thought, but still kinda boring.

no u

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware is compiled for i486 and has been for a LOOOOOONG time.

Re:no u

[volkerdi]

Slackware is compiled for i486 and has been for a LOOOOOONG time.

Yes, but it was not until gcc started to output i486-specific opcodes whether you liked it or not. At that point, what the hell. :)

Re:no u

[Osgeld]

I can pinpoint it for you

anything before slackware 9 supports 386, 9 and above require 486

hey guys!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey guys! I "hacked" my iPhone by installing iOS 5 on it. I had to plug in the USB cable and everything! I'm so awesome!

Re:hey guys!

[ceoyoyo]

Hey, with iOS 5 you won't have to do the USB cable thing anymore! Awesome hack!

Lo-fi world

[jones_supa]

I sometimes wonder how old PC could you use if we made a lo-fi version of everything in current world. If we cut some corners, for example Facebook could be run in text mode with images viewed in some separate "SVGA viewer" program. :) MP3/video playback would be tough. Pentium II should be able to do anything. Of course today we have better minimal hardware like Atom/ARM available.

Re:Lo-fi world

[Osgeld]

http://hackaday.com/2011/07/24/hacking-14-year-old-power-pc-mac-back-to-life/

Re:Lo-fi world

[jones_supa]

Here's also an interesting story where a guy pushed a dual CPU 440BX board to its maximum. It has 1.05GHz P3 processors and can even run stuff like Red Alert 3.

http://forums.tweaktown.com/gigabyte/31535-oldschool-gigabyte-board-still-kickin-6bxds.html

Re:Lo-fi world

[zhazam]

Given that most of the "hot" social media have APIs available, it shouldn't be hard to set up a text-only version of them for everything with an Ethernet card. MP3/video playback isn't too bad - as the 8088 Corruption demo shows, it doesn't have to take much to get video running :)

Re:Lo-fi world

[ceoyoyo]

A Pentium II? To render text web pages and a few pictures (in a separate viewer)?

I hate to tell you, but we had the web with pictures and everything (yes and MP3s too) in the 90s with 386s and 486s.

Re:Lo-fi world

[damnbunni]

I was able to play MP3s (in mono!) on my Amiga 3000 T. That was a 25 MHz 68040; given the difference in architecture, a 486/50 should be able to handle it. I know a 486/75 can handle MP3s; that's what's in my old Thinkpad.

Video's a matter of choosing an appropriate format. Quicktime 2, anyone?

Re:Lo-fi world

[jones_supa]

A Pentium II? To render text web pages and a few pictures (in a separate viewer)?

No, I was thinking about everything from video playback to some nice games.

Performance of newer distros

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would like to see is for him to install a recent version of a source-based distribution (like Gentoo) on the laptop, and then benchmark that and compare it to the old Debian version he has. It would be interesting to see actually how bloated software has (or hasn't) become as hardware has gotten more powerful.

At some point, you just have to move on ....

[King_TJ]

A while ago, I tried to tackle a similar project with an Acer 486 class notebook I was given for free. (It was in practically new condition, other than its battery not holding much of a charge any more. The owner took immaculate care of it and then stuffed it in a carrying bag, in a coat closet, for years before giving it to me.)

I thought it was a shame not to try to get it running something useful. (It had Windows '95 on it, which didn't run very well. Even if I wanted to keep '95 on it, I would have needed the restore/recovery media which was missing.) Linux seemed like the obvious answer, but after wasting several days downloading and trying out various distros, I found that the only ones providing good performance were VERY stripped down obscure versions designed for old/obsolete hardware.

In the end, I wound up with a machine that had a working Linux OS on it, but nobody would ever really use for anything. I mean, why bother when the typical smartphone was WAY more functional and user-friendly? Not to mention, replacement battery packs for this old laptop were still selling for upwards of $70 new, which would REALLY make no sense to invest in it. Yet without one, it didn't even offer the level of portability a laptop was supposed to provide.

If you step back to something even OLDER like this 386 machine? You're really reaching a point where you're simply being foolish to waste your time with it. Even the article's author struggled to justify a possible use for the computer he going working with Debian. Basically, all he could come up with is that it might work as something you didn't care if you screwed up, just to poke around and learn the basics on Linux on. Well, let's stop and think about that one a minute. With all the hassle it was setting it up in the FIRST place, would it really be "no big deal" if you screwed up the installation messing around with it? I think, as slow as it was doing the install on it, it would be a rather big headache, actually. And you'd really want to use an ancient 386 laptop as a Linux learning tool? You couldn't find SOMEONE who'd give you a free Dell or HP desktop/mini tower that had at least a generation or two newer CPU in it?? (I think I have at least 4 or 5 such systems out in my garage collecting dust as we speak.)

About the only real nugget of interest I gleaned from this whole article is the fact that pretty much everyone has removed the 386 support from their Linux distros these days. (I doubt I would have ever spent the time to verify that fact myself.)

I like computer history as much as the next guy, but that doesn't mean a feel a duty to be curator of my own computer hardware museum. If you can't find a good dedicated job for an ancient machine of this type to do (say a controller for a model railroad layout or a dedicated machine to program phone PBX systems or high-end routers or switches with?), I think you're probably best sending it off for recycling and looking for something a little newer.

Pfft

[jvin248]

What about FreeSCO router project? It's Linux, it runs from a floppy, and runs on 386's... I've had it on a 486 before, but mostly only have newer Pentium-2s to use for that sort of thing. Which are good for FreeNAS.

I Thought That Was Normal

[Anonymous Coward]

My first Linux was Slackware 1.3 or whatever, about 1995, and I put it on a 386sx that I got at the thrift store for $3.97. Worked great, although compiling kernels (an absolute necessity to get my 3c507 card to work) took a while.

Re:I Thought That Was Normal

[Osgeld]

that was normal, in 1995... today your lucky if you can find more than a couple sites that even document how to deal with a 386, and a trillion hits of "um can I run linux on a 1.4ghz 1gb pentium 3, its really old"

My Early Hack

[bluegreen997]

My old hardware hack was a 486SX that had IIRC 8M of memory. It was an old Gateway desktop (the old style case where it was designed to sit on your desk with the monitor on top) that I don't even remember where I got it. I had it running 95/98 at some points for my dad at a real estate office he was working at on and off to use with some awful 14" CRT. (They would not have had a computer period had we not put that thing there. But that is another story.)

So once I got it back I was in need of a router. Installed Barebones RH v5.0 and removed every package that it did not absolutly need to run to get enough room to install GCC and some other things on it. It ran ipchains like a champ for a few years. I remember one of the NICs was a 3Com who's driver had been written by some guy at NASA back in the day.

One day the PSU fan's bearing went so I had to pull it and did not have a replacment for it and so it ran totally fanless for a while after that until I retired it. I don't mind having my much smaller, more modern, and lower power all in one wifi router but I do kinda miss my old pizza box router sometimes.

Obligatory

[rust627]

imagine a beowulf cluster of those.......

Re:Obligatory

[Osgeld]

1.21 jigawatts and it might equal the power of a industrial space heater and a low end Pentium 3 hehe

now I remener why I saved those Caldera Disks

[gearloos]

When Caldera, Redhat, and Slackware ruled the Linux world, 386 support was everywhere. I still have some Caldera Disks, as well as Redhat 4.x or so haha. Now I have a reason to keep them. Oh now about that 386....Anyone got a spare? lol

Re:now I remener why I saved those Caldera Disks

[Osgeld]

yea I have old caldera and redhat disks (I think I have redhat 4 on cd) along with solaris desktop 2.6 but you want to talk about a bitch to install ... they should make solaris desktop 2.6 the poster child for hard to install, its a CD of source and a manual

Every Year...

[No Tears In The End]

I get pushed more and more into being "the old geek".

I still have Red Hat 4.2 CDs that were intended to run on 386 and up... Why is this noteworthy?
Seriously.

Haven't you people ever seen an RPM? Do you know what that "i386" in the filename means?

I'm not impressed.

NTITE

Re:Every Year...

[Osgeld]

i386 means 32 bit platform now days, every single distro dropped the i386 cpu a decade ago

so go right ahead thinking 386 means it will run on a 386, this is linux after all, your lucky if you dont have an aneurysm trying to figure out where the heck the "desktop" is in modern distros

heck in many distros i386 will only work on a 486, 586 and higher including debian, and freebsd

Re:Every Year...

[No Tears In The End]

The 386 is a 32 bit processor. Yes, even the 386 sx is a 32 bit chip.

If they've dropped i386 support, they should name their packages differently. For example, Mandrake is the first distro that I ever used that required a Pentium or better and their packages were "i586" to indicate that.

NTITE

Re:Every Year...

[Osgeld]

well talk to "them", I did not come up with the wackamamie naming thing, life would be much easier if your targeting a 386 to look for a i386 distro but thats linux for you

Re:Every Year...

[No Tears In The End]

No need. The point remains. I still have CDs from 14 years ago that will install Red Hat onto a 386 with no problems at all.

NTITE

Re:Every Year...

[Osgeld]

grats?

Re:Every Year...

[No Tears In The End]

---------> The point
  O
  |
--+-- You
  |
  ^

Re:Every Year...

[Anonymous Coward]

The 386 is a 32 bit processor. Yes, even the 386 sx is a 32 bit chip.

Which worked with a 16 bit databus to keep motherboard costs down.

math coprocessor

[Anonymous Coward]

You're confusing the 386 with the 486. Neither the 386SX nor the 386DX had a built-in math coprocessor. The math coprocessor didn't even exist yet when the 386DX (originally just called the 386) was launched.

The math coprocessor did indeed exist at that time. In 1989, I installed one in a CompuAdd 286 so that I could run AutoCAD release 10 at work. (I had to do the same thing when my company "thoughtfully" bought me a Gateway 386SX, which - lacking an integrated math coprocessor - wouldn't run AutoCAD either, unless you installed a separate math coprocessor.)

Been there, done that

[Meeni]

About 12 years ago, or something.

Whoopee

[Anonymous Coward]

I am ... underwhelmed. In other news, I installed bias ply tires on my 1968 F150 pickup truck today. And aired them up. And balanced them on a 1955 vintage bubble balancer. And it rode like a truck.

386sx laptop, Slackware

[Anonymous Coward]

I took an old IBM note book 386sx 20mhz 6mb ram and 80 mb HD and switched up the hard ware a bit.
Added 387 math co processor, switched 80mb HD with 2 Gb Hard disk (Linux, enabled use of disk past 540Mb).
Installed Slackware and it worked perfectly. The Math Co Processor was required though without a recompile.
(A parallel port cdrom also helped)
Slow, but functional.

x386?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you mean there's still one around that will boot?

I'm late to this..

[devphaeton]

I'm way late to this (girlfriend was over all weekend so I didn't touch a single computer. How's that for an excuse?)

Buuuut... I currently have a 300mhz K6-II from 1998 that runs a current Debian Stable. I thought I would make it a minecraft server but it turns out that it doesn't have enough ram (minecraft will refuse to even start without at least 800MB or so). Prior to this it was a FreeBSD 8.x webserver, fileserver and firewall. It replaces the 486DX2 that was running (then current) FBSD 6.x at the time the smoke came out of its power supply.

I applaud when people find uses for older hardware, but IMHO putting a similarly aged OS on an old computer isn't really much of a hack. I could get all retro and put Win95 on this machine and Slackware 5.0 in a dual-boot setup like the old days. (Still have the disks in the closet).

That said, running older hardware just isn't as fun as it sounds. Pulling up the list of fbsd software packages in sysinstall takes a full 13 minutes (from download to uncompressing the tarball to displaying the menu). I know because I've timed it. You really have to consider if you want to build a package from ports, because it can easily eat up an afternoon, and/or an evening depending upon dependencies. Rebuilding the kernel was about 4.5 hours, and a build world on just a base install is about a day and a half.

As a Debian machine, the install scripts will only install a '486' kernel. Building a new kernel from new source was a serious ordeal, much more serious than the days when this was my #1 box up to about 2002. The reason I chose Debian is because Archlinux, (the distribution that champions itself as the saviour of older systems) doesn't support anything i586 and lower. Irony.

All I initially wanted was a text-only system for software development (C and Perl). Maybe some occasional BitchX and Mutt use now and again. It does that pretty well (I want to say FreeBSD is a better choice than the Debian, in this case), but that's about *all* it does well. As a fileserver, it's pretty slow, even on the LAN. 12 year old hard drive technology and 33mhz busses, etc.

I could go on a rant about software bloat in the OSS community and how 2008 seemed like an abrupt cutoff for when I could run X or anything graphical on this machine, but I'll save it for another day.

Without X, why not?

[unixisc]

As long as one is not installing X or any GUI, why not? In CLI only mode, any Linux, BSD should work. But if you have something like that, maybe try HURD!
Actually, Minix 3 is a better option, since it's targeting precisely this space!