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Installing Linux On a 386 Laptop

Posted by timothy on from the for-the-modern-luddite dept.

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.

21 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. this is a hack? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:this is a hack? by fragMasterFlash · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:this is a hack? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:this is a hack? by Demonoid-Penguin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:this is a hack? by ProgramadorPerdido · · Score: 2

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

    5. Re:this is a hack? by asdf7890 · · Score: 2

      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.

    6. Re:this is a hack? by Demonoid-Penguin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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).

    7. Re:this is a hack? by Hognoxious · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    8. Re:this is a hack? by adolf · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
  2. Rainy day by Jack+Malmostoso · · Score: 2

    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.

  3. Re:Why? by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 2

    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.

  4. Re:Why? by jones_supa · · Score: 2

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

  5. Compiler Technology by TejWC · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Compiler Technology by eclectro · · Score: 3, Informative

      >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.

      --
      Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
  6. This is nothing! by Scholasticus · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  7. OpenBSD by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    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.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
  8. SX is 100% compatible with DX by perpenso · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX by bmo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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

    2. Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX by volkerdi · · Score: 2

      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.

    3. Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX by hal2814 · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX by SScorpio · · Score: 2

      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.