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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."

29 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting project by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Ironically this makes it safe from the Meltdown and Spectre attacks."

    No, there's no irony there at all - not even in the manner "irony" gets misused sometimes.

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    1. Re:Interesting project by burtosis · · Score: 2

      It's like writing a song all wrong about irony, till they change how it's said.

    2. Re:Interesting project by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2, Insightful

      No, there's no irony there at all - not even in the manner "irony" gets misused sometimes.

      Of course there is - in that aspect the 486 is more secure than the new chips that are billed as having all sorts of security-promoting features.

      There's no NX bit on the 486, though, so overall it's not more secure, even with the recent vulnerabilities.

      --
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  2. 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 Hal_Porter · · Score: 2

      Windows 8 and later require SSE2 too

      https://support.microsoft.com/...

      Windows XP and 7 don't.

      --
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    2. 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.

    3. Re:If only more old hardware was supported. by arth1 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      This is simply not true. Firefox builds just fine on a PIII here, using gentoo. You just need an ffmpeg that's built without SSE2.

      Chromium won't build on a PIII, but that's not because of SSE2, but because you need at least 2 GB RAM to link it.

  3. Re by pele · · Score: 2

    64MB RAM? Eh??? Back then 64MB of RAM cost £60k. And I don't think PCs supported more than 8 or 16MB. I had 4x1MB 30pin and had 2 72pin slots free. Later added 2x2MB in 95 or thereabouts. X would fly with 8 megs. Anyway I forgot more about Linux then I know right now but I think it did run on DX (i.e. 32-bit) machines only, SX was 16-bit, right?

    1. Re: Re by mrbester · · Score: 2

      I had a DX4 100 with 16MB RAM. Ran BeOS nicely.

      --
      "Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
    2. 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.

  4. I Run Linux On A Commodore 64 by dryriver · · Score: 2, Funny

    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)

    --
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    1. 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. 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.

    --
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  6. 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.

    1. Re: Well, this tells me modern software is shit by pele · · Score: 4, Insightful

      We used to say (back in the 486-era) how software of today is shit and how everything was flying on 286-es in assembler. And 8085s...

    2. Re:Well, this tells me modern software is shit by gravewax · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The software of that era had complete and utter shit for security, hardware support, ease of use, stability and graphics etc etc. sure it ran fast, your car would go faster too if you took out all the windows, airbags, seatbelts, the doors and panels, stripped out the seats, air con, reduced fuel tank size to 10% of current capacity, not many people though would say that the car was better and today's cars are shit because of everything they come with.

  7. Re: why does this matter? by pele · · Score: 2

    I ran a web server with cgi off of postgres95 back then would you believe it. And sendmail.

  8. Re: why does this matter? by pele · · Score: 2

    Actually decoding mpeg layer3 was rather difficult.

  9. 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.

    1. Re:Memories by dow · · Score: 2

      My introduction to Linux was on an Amiga with a 50mhz 68030 cpu, fpu, and 16mb ram expansion for a total 18mb. It could run an X server quite fine. Later moved over to the PC, but it was only my first steps with the Amiga version that confirmed Linux as the OS choice when I did. I remember the PPP How-To, and really appreciated that one in particular. Thankyou!

  10. Systemd by ArchieBunker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Systemd is probably the cause of the slow boot time. I'd love to see a light weight modern OS like NetBSD tested. Probably boots 10x faster.

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    1. Re:Systemd by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      > Systemd...

      Gentoo Linux uses OpenRC by default. You have to go out of your way to install systemd.

      Check 102 seconds into the video. You can clearly see the string "OpenRC 0.34.11 is starting up Gentoo Linux (i486)"

      Prior to that we can see that it takes the kernel nearly 14 seconds to pass control to init.

      Actually, watch the video. You get a really good sense of which services take an unreasonable amount of time to start. (Under ordinary circumstances, OpenRC doesn't need to regenerate its service dependence cache, so his next boot will shave a couple of minutes off of the start time we see in this video.)

    2. Re:Systemd by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      Systemd is probably the cause of the slow boot time.

      So to be clear, systemd whose single useless feature people advertise as faster boot time is the result of the slow boot time despite the fact that Gentoo doesn't even use systemd?

      What next? Systemd kicked your dog and slept with your wife while you were debugging a sysvinit script?

  11. Re: why does this matter? by sg_oneill · · Score: 2

    I still have fond memories of giving a talk in the 90s in "the $70 web server" to a Linux conf about dumpster diving an old 486 with a minescule amount of ram and repurposing it as a webserver , IRC host and mail server for a bunch of clubs at the uni I was at. (The $75 was for a hard drive and coax network card). I remember being approached by some IBM drones afterwards offering us a license for OS/2 to replace the Linux of the machine. I think my response was something to the effect of "haha.... god no"

    --
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  12. Re: Pointless support...is pointless. by pele · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Well, I hope you never have to retrieve a quarter-megapixel digital photo from your graduation ceremony off an ATA disk. Or an original LaTeX of your final year project, for example. Don't worry soon enough you won't have a cd reader anywhere around you and loads of burned cds...

  13. Bringing back fond memories by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 2

    I well remember testing out operating systems on 486 based hardware. I actually did tests with Windows, with early Linux releases, and with HURD on the same host. HURD was unusable. Linux became a critical part of the environment very quickly, since genuine UNIX systems were much more expensive than our limited development budget could support.

  14. 486s were Amazoning by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    I had a DX100 because when the Pentium hit you couldn't give them away. Heck, when I wanted a Vesa local bus card I drove down to a computer shop to ask for one and they just handed me one out of the junk pile.

    But I got 90% of the performance of a $2000 Pentium for about $300 bucks and most of that was hard drive & ram. I played near arcade perfect ports of X-Men: Children of the Atom & Primal Rage on it not to mention Rise of the Triad and Doom.

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  15. Re:Of course you can. by mark-t · · Score: 2

    Heck no.... this is slashdot. :)

    --
    File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
  16. Re:Pointless support...is pointless. by toejam13 · · Score: 2

    For desktop or server use, sure. But the 486 series was quite popular for embedded, industrial, and aerospace hardware use. Intel didn't halt production of the 486 until 2007. I remember using a number of 486 industrial devices running BSD or DOS well into the mid-2000s.

    And while early ISA-based 486 systems were incredibly slow, later PCI-based 486 systems were much better, especially when paired with processors like the AMD 5x86/133.