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Can You Install Linux On a 1993 PC? (yeokhengmeng.com)
Slashdot reader yeokm1 writes: The oldest x86 CPU that the Lnux kernel supports today is theoretically the 486. However is this theory actually true in practice? I decided to put this theory to the test in my project.
His site describes installing Gentoo Linux on an "ancient" IBM PS/1 Consultant 2133 19C (released in 1993), with 64MB SIMM-72 RAM. (Though to speed things up, he compiled that minimal version of Gentoo on a modern Thinkpad T430 released in 2012.) "Due to the age of the PC, the BIOS only supports booting from the floppy drive or internal HDD," so there was also some disk partitioning and kernel configuration. ("Must disable 64-bit kernel for obvious reasons!") A half-hour video shows that it takes almost 11 minutes just to boot up -- and five and a half minutes to shut down. "Despite the many roadblocks I faced, I was impressed by the level of support Linux has for ancient hardware like this."
And there's one more added bonus. "Given the age of the 486 (1989 technology), it does not support branch prediction... Ironically this makes it safe from the Meltdown and Spectre attacks."
His site describes installing Gentoo Linux on an "ancient" IBM PS/1 Consultant 2133 19C (released in 1993), with 64MB SIMM-72 RAM. (Though to speed things up, he compiled that minimal version of Gentoo on a modern Thinkpad T430 released in 2012.) "Due to the age of the PC, the BIOS only supports booting from the floppy drive or internal HDD," so there was also some disk partitioning and kernel configuration. ("Must disable 64-bit kernel for obvious reasons!") A half-hour video shows that it takes almost 11 minutes just to boot up -- and five and a half minutes to shut down. "Despite the many roadblocks I faced, I was impressed by the level of support Linux has for ancient hardware like this."
And there's one more added bonus. "Given the age of the 486 (1989 technology), it does not support branch prediction... Ironically this makes it safe from the Meltdown and Spectre attacks."
I just type in LOAD "LINUX" , 8 , 1 and off the C64 goes. Booting requires some "disc swapping" of course, and is sometimes hard on the Datasettte unit, but it works. Most impressive is that is that I've managed to solder a current Nvidia Titan GPU to the underside of the Commodore as well. This lets me run C64 games like The Last Ninja, International Karate II and Infernal Runner at 8K UHD 144Hz. I can also run all Playstation Pro 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch games on the unit. Even games that haven't been developed and released yet, like Grand Theft Auto 6 run great on this souped up Linux 64 unit. Oh, and the unit can time travel as well. I had coffee with Leonardo Da Vinci just this morning. He told me that he was painting a portrait of an Italian lady who hit her head recently and has a strange smile frozen on her visage. Amazing what a few beers before going on Slashdot can achieve, right? =) (The idiocy in this post is released under the GNU GPL 3.0 License)
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.