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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.

9 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 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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).

  2. 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"
  3. 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.

  4. 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

  5. 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.