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Can You Install Linux On a 1993 PC? (yeokhengmeng.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the quarter-of-a-century dept.

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."

7 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. If only more old hardware was supported. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The big loss is that Firefox and Chromium no longer work on pre SSE2 processors so you can't surf the modern web on old computers anymore.

    1. Re: If only more old hardware was supported. by Miamicanes · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Before anyone gets *too* nostalgic for old games, remember that in the *really* old days (early 80s), game development went something like this:

      1. Discover some cool graphics hack that let you do something novel... reuse sprites, change graphics modes mid-screen, animate by changing the color palette, etc.

      2. Come up with some excuse to turn it into a game.

      3. Create awful, shitty, pointless, and un-fun ports to every other popular system, regardless of viability.

      3a. Don't forget CGA, EGA, and Hercules versions, plus Atari ST. And Apple II (non-GS).

      Had it not been for Atari's early-80s implosion, we probably would have seen abominations like "Yars Revenge for CGA" (shudder), ignoring the fact that the game's entire reason for EXISTENCE was the "color static" effect.

  2. Re:why does this matter? by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

    In 1994 I was using Linux on a 486 DX 50mhz originally with 4 megs of RAM. I had upgrade to 20 megs a few months later, so I could use X efficiently.
    What can you do with a 486 Linux system? Probably more then you think. Just not as many things at once. You can run a web server, a database probably not both at the same time. However if you maxed the RAM you could get a lot done on slow CPU. If you checked you fast Computer most of the time your CPU is idle. On a 486 you can do nearly anything you can do on any other 32bit computer.

    --
    If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
  3. Well, this tells me modern software is shit by lamer01 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The software that existed at the same time this 486 was prevalent ran just fine and rather quickly on the 486. This modern (last 20 years) with layering software with countless abstraction layers has produced utter crap software. I would like to see how fast the software of that era runs on modern PCs versus the crap software we put on them today.

  4. Re:I Run Linux On A Commodore 64 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You joke, but the Contiki operating system, which is now marketed as a modern OS for the Internet of Things, started out as a multitasking, networked operating system for the Commodore 64 and other 6502-based systems. They seem to have scrubbed almost all references to that off their web site, though.

  5. Memories by jgotts · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I switched to Linux in May of 1994. That computer had a 486DX2 66 with a whopping 12 MB of RAM. Slackware was pretty much your only choice, and I installed Slackware 2.0 from 3 1/2 inch floppies.

    It took me days and days to get on the Internet with PPP from my dorm room at the university, and from that experience I wrote a mini-HOWTO.

    That's where I'd get started if I wanted an authentic 1993 Linux experience. Be prepared for nothing working as you would expect out of the box. Out of necessity I immediately became a Linux developer and author. I even wrote one patch for the kernel and at one time maintained two kernel modules.

    Now I pretty much don't do any Linux development except for work, but I've been doing it for 24 years now.

  6. Re: Re by pele · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Sorry to burst your bubble my fried but that list is wrong.
    What the author fails to mention is that 4 sims of 1mb each would cost £240 yet a single 4mb simm was priced WAY more that those 4 1mb simms. And then a 72-pin simm would again be slightly more expensive than a 30-pin one. To get up to 64MB you would need 4x16MB simms. Probably 72-pin ones as I don't seem to recall anything bigger than 4MB in 30-pin guise. My unix lab (where I'd later come to work at) bought a 64MB simm (or whatever SparcServer 20 modules were called back then) and paid between 60 and 90k for it, can't remember the exact figure. SunSite at src.doc.ic.ac.uk had 128MB and 2GB disk and was regarded as one of the beefier machines in the country, sponsored by Sun. So no $2400 wouldn't have covered it.