14 ms·

Linux on a 486SX

227 points by marttt 5y ago

zeeblazer 5y ago
A few tips! A floppy drive emulator you can load with usb is available now. Pretty sweet device for something like your project. The 36 pin connector on the sound card was probably a scsi cd-rom connector. They used to put them with the sound card :)
SigmundA 5y ago
My first job at computer store in high school I worked without pay initially just to get parts to build a 486-DX with it wonderful floating point unit so I could finally play Falcon 3.0 properly. That same job taught me networking (Novell) and got me programming business apps in MS Access and the rest is history. Unfortunately I didn't get into Linux until much later.
UncleSlacky 5y ago
I did something similar with a Compaq Contura 4/25c about 15-20 years ago. It had 8 Mb RAM so I was able to install Slackware 3.9 (IIRC) via floppies with a standalone X session running Netscape. Later I put Win 95c on it (again, via floppies) which ran fairly well.
- axiolite 5y ago
  I still have my Contura in a box in a closet. Along with a PCMCIA network card, the docking station and the 20MB RAM upgrade. Used it up until ~2010 when I got a similarly tiny and inexpensive EeePC. Was a nice small, cheap system that worked well enough as a dumb serial/telnet/ssh terminal for network management tasks. It was only a little bit slow to start an SSH session. Even started up fast with Linux or FreeBSD. OpenBSD was rather slow to boot. I didn't have much reason to bother with X11. Text utilities always got the job done, including for web browsing needs thanks to links.
rconti 5y ago
Apparently they meant to say "modern Linux on a 486SX" as, obviously, Linux ran just fine on a 486 back when all this stuff was new. (Mine was a 486DX/33, but with 4GB of RAM. Compiling a kernel took 8 hours, but I digress.)
- fmakunbound 5y ago
  > a 486DX/33, but with 4GB of RAM Wonder how long it took to sequentially scan 4GB of RAM
  - tudorconstantin 5y ago
    I think it was 4MB. I think there weren't too many 4GB HDDs back then
- vidarh 5y ago
  Yeah, 486's with 16MB RAM were our default X terminals at the time, and it worked quite well.
noufalibrahim 5y ago
This is really nice. I once got a hold of an old Pentium when I had just started work and wanted to get Linux to work on it. It had 3.5" drives and no CD drive. I used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux and got a basic system working without much hassle. I believe it even had a minimal X server running with twm or something. Enough to work on. I still maintain that after hardware ages a little, Linux (and perhaps other free operating systems and distros) are the only way to give a soul to the machine.
dmitrygr 5y ago
I played this slimming-modern-linux-down game recently on a MIPS device. Getting it below 4MB is hard...too much cruft has accumulated in it.
MailNerd 5y ago
It's amazing how few resources a Linux (or BSD) server requires. I have a twenty year old desktop machine (quality Fujitsu Siemens hardware but nothing unusal) reimaged as a storage/playground server and it's just fast enough. Can also handle some 18 TB storage.
Teknoman117 5y ago
I really wish I didn't give away the Dell 316LT I came across a number of years ago (~2008?) at a swap meet. I had the whole kit - 386SX16, 8 MB of RAM, extra screens, the manuals, an external 5.25" drive, and all the diagnostic disks. But, my parents were moving us from a large house in Alabama to a small apartment in California and we didn't have the space for most of my parts (cough e-waste cough) collection. Teenage me had no idea what to do with it. I didn't know how to compile a Linux kernel from source, at that point I'd barely started moving beyond Atmel AVRs and Java on LEGO Mindstorms.
djur 5y ago
Wow, this is exactly the same type of computer (all-in-one Compaq Presario 486) that I first installed Linux on. Slackware 3.x, if I recall correctly, disk images downloaded at 14.4kbps and loaded onto every spare floppy I could find. I don't think I even got X11 going because that was a lot more disks!
lost_soul 5y ago
Linux taught me about computers and it taught me about politics. I worked at a university where the demand for Internet far exceeded the capabilities of the network. While a filtering bridge may reduce broadcast storms to an acceptable level, it also permitted the administration to delay much needed upgrades.
Prolixium 5y ago
This post makes me want to roll my own Linux kernel again. I used to build vanilla kernels on Slackware (2.2.x!) and then Gentoo a /long/ time ago as well as modify stock Debian kernels to remove stuff I didn't need and tweak some knobs as of just a few years ago. I feel like it's almost required to page through the various dialogs in menuconfig periodically in order to stay current when it comes to modern hardware and how it can interact with the OS.
flyinghamster 5y ago
I have a couple of things from bygone Linux days: a retail copy of Red Hat 5.1 (pre-RHEL), and a 6-CD InfoMagic compilation. The latter was especially handy back before cable modems came to town. I recall downloading an earlier Slackware, one floppy image at a time, over 14.4K dialup when 14.4K was fast, and it still took forever. The InfoMagic discs: Disc 1: Slackware 3.0 and Debian 0.93R6 Disc 2: Red Hat 3.0.3 for x86 Disc 3: Archive of sunsite.unc.edu Disc 4: GNU source archive from prep.ai.mit.edu Disc 5: Archive of tsx-11.mit.edu Disc 6: Demos and Red Hat 2.1 for Alpha
Teknoman117 5y ago
Super neat! I went through the same process for some AM5x86-133 industrial computers with 32 MiB of RAM. I didn't think to change PHYSICAL_START or use musl. It's usually set at the 16 MiB mark so that the kernel doesn't consume any of the memory in the ISA DMA / ISA device zone. One thing I would recommend that I didn't see mentioned is switching to the SLOB allocator in the kernel. It's more space efficient than SLUB or SLAB, but it is slower if you have a large amount of memory. (It's hidden unless you set CONFIG_EXPERT). The main problem I bumped into for minifying a modern Linux kernel is that so much of the modern Linux ecosystem (systemd, OpenRC, runit, etc.) expects a lot of the networking stack to be enabled, along with cgroups, namespaces, etc. In order to get a minimal Gentoo i486 image to boot, I needed to turn a lot of things on in the tinyconfig kernel. Admittedly, it's hard to image a Linux/Unix system without some form of networking :)
- anthk 5y ago
  OpenWRT would be "easier", but you must find the kernel configs and CFLAGS for i486 by yourself.
jll29 5y ago
This evoked fond memories of the first time Linux boots up with X11 (startx&) after installing SLS twice from 50 3.5" disks (the first round saw one disk cause a read error necessitating another trip to the nearest university). Ran like a breeze on a 486DX-33 with 4 MB RAM, xeyes and all. Hard to be believe at the time - a UNIX in my own room! :-O
caseyf 5y ago
all of those Slackware floppies and an Acermate 386SX/20
miskin 5y ago
We ran our Java Users Group website in 1998 on 486SX with 16MB of RAM. It was running Slackware and website was served by Apache + JServ (this was before Tomcat existed) + MySQL. When I was sitting in the office where the "server" was located, I could hear when we had visitors - HDD was frantically swapping to switch between Apache and MySQL. It's hard to compare to the luxury we have with servers today.
int_19h 5y ago
For easy-to-setup modern networking on hardware this old, consider using a WiFi modem such as this: https://www.tindie.com/products/theoldnet/rs232-serial-wifi-modem-for-vintage-computers-v3/ https://www.tindie.com/products/theoldnet/rs232-serial-wifi-... In short, these let you connect to WiFi using AT commands, and then "dial" IP addresses and hostnames as if they were phone numbers.
cmrdporcupine 5y ago
My first x86 machine (after running a 68000 Atari ST for years before) was a 486DX50 and I ran the first versions of Linux (pre-ELF), 1993ish, installing off floppy, downloaded via 9600 baud modem. Dual booted with Windows 3.1 and DOS. It's nice to see recent kernel versions can still work fairly well on this hardware. I don't recall my boot times being as long as 50s though. But who knows, it was a different time and expectations were different. I had 8MB RAM and a 200MB drive and while there was swapping, I was able to run X11, emacs, Mosaic (and then Netscape), and some terminals without serious problems.
Threeve303 5y ago
Installing Red Hat 3 and 4 was always a fun experience
mysterydip 5y ago
Awesome and thanks for documenting the process! There's large DOS communities with people running vintage hardware, but not much I know of for linux.
- saint_angels 5y ago
  I think running a vintage DOS system is popular because there is a lot of DOS games. Linux doesn't have as much hardware/OS-dependent nostalgic software.
- axiolite 5y ago
  With DOS, there are lots of reasons you'd NEED to run an ancient OS on ancient hardware. Of course emulation provides some more options... With Linux, you can just keep your ancient programs and hardware running on modern systems.
nousermane 5y ago
Few months ago, somebody did a series of live streaming events on bringing up a 486-based tablet PC (which happened to be an old voting machine) with modern linux. Kernel turned out to be the easy part. Booting grub from BIOS that doesn't support LBA addressing (CHS only) - a bit harder. Running X11 on hardware without PCI - ridiculously hard: https://diode.zone/w/kMhja4oBUvP6CScsiDZP38 https://diode.zone/w/kMhja4oBUvP6CScsiDZP38
- hulitu 5y ago
  From some time X is a moving target. It's better if you can run XFree86 on old hardware.
- anthk 5y ago
  Try Delicate Linux. Compile Libressl, then install it at /opt/libressl and recompile Lynx against libressl with CFLAGS="-I/opt/libressl/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/libressl/lib" ./configure; make; sudo make install. Try gopher://hngopher.com first and later, https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  Perhaps this was addressed in the video, but I wonder if that tinkerer tried LILO? It is still supported and might fare better with old hardware.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - morganvachon 5y ago
    Indeed, Slackware still defaults to LILO/eLILO and it works perfectly fine on modern hardware, older hardware from LILO's heyday should be no issue at all. I still hang on to a PIII based Dell Latitude laptop from 2001 and Slackware -current runs surprisingly well on it (along with BeOS 5.1 from my original disc, QNX RTOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and a few other obscure OSes from its generation to today).
    - 5y ago
outsidein 5y ago
Remember the days back in 90‘ (Must have been 1994) when installing Slackware distribution on 486 DX from about 15 floppy disks to the internal HDD. Had running Linux as web proxy until about 2001. Interesting to see that what was quite normal at that time has become to a topic of interest again.
- outsidein 5y ago
  To add a fun story where Linux saved my live. Back in the 90‘ we had a Clipper / dBASE based DOS app used for capturing orders in a call center after TV commercials. In this case a prime TV show to generate donations. Full house with >100 agents busy. Then the Novell Netware server crashed, and was unable to mount the disks. We managed to switch the users to an older server so they could continue to work. But it first seemed the HDD and files got corrupted and unrecoverable by disk tools from Netware. We thought of using a commercial recovery service, but this would cause delay and cost $$$$. So I removed the disks from Netware, fired up a Linux PC, connected the HDD to the Adaptec SCSI (Luckily install prior for a CD drive). The file system was not mountable, but something like dd /dev/sdb1 |strings „JJJJMMDD“ discovered lots of salvage records. This literally saved my ass and the company.
  - outsidein 5y ago
    Last year I finally ditched some spare i386 CPU and memory modules (sort of 1, 2, 4 MByte) after getting no response on eBay.
  - outsidein 5y ago
    The HP Laserjet 2100 M (PCL and PostScript) is still running. Someone interested into the original PCL Language book which came with the printer?
    - tinus_hn 5y ago
      Be aware that these old HP printers consume a rather large amount of energy no matter whether they are in use or in standby.
chasil 5y ago
I have an old Am586 in a drawer that I could send this guy. At least he would have a math coprocessor.
readingnews 5y ago
Ah, those were the days. There is a long list of dmesg outputs from linux on many old systems, while not as old as the 486, there is an AMD K6/2... and sparcs! http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg_index.html http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg_index.html The TRI-m in that list was a 486, although not modern linux. http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg/dmesg_machz.html http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg/dmesg_machz.html
HeckFeck 5y ago
In ~2006 I was gifted a 486 desktop by my neighbour, it was a Mitac 486 running Windows 3.1 and DOS. It came with a matching VGA monitor. It had a floppy drive, 160MB hard disk and DIN keyboard. The mouse was fitted to a serial port. There was no sound card; sound was achieved by a driver that somehow bunged PCM through the PC speaker. Unfortunately it didn't survive a household clear out 3 years later, and that fills me with regret. Maybe I could've been trying my own projects on it now. I always liked the relative simplicity of the OS and hardware.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  With a certain nostalgia, I remember playing MIDs through the PC speaker back in the 286 days. From 5,25" floppy disks no less.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rasengan 5y ago
I ran Linux on a 486 DX for quite some time including providing shells to people on IRC. Don't run X and it's more than powerful enough.
- anthk 5y ago
  With SVGALib and now framebuffer you can run image and PDF viewers. Videos, well, maybe from a Pentium and up with MPEG movies.
- vidarh 5y ago
  A 486 can handle X just fine. 486's were our main X11 desktop machines at the office in the mid 90's (it has been the year of Linux on the desktop for me since 1995). The challenge is more that most modern X clients won't play well with a slow, memory constrained machine.
  - anthk 5y ago
    Damn Small Linux ran fine under a 486. I liked the black fluxbox theme.
  - sobkas 5y ago
    > A 486 can handle X just fine. 486's were our main X11 desktop machines at the office in the mid 90's (it has been the year of Linux on the desktop for me since 1995). The challenge is more that most modern X clients won't play well with a slow, memory constrained machine. I remember when X switched from monolithic server to modular one. I had to buy new GPU because S3 I had wasn't supported. I have bought ATI.
chalst 5y ago
It's pretty cool to get an up-to-date Linux working on such old hardware but I get the impression this kind of thing is going to get harder to do with the major distributions dropping support for 32 bit x86. I've been using NetBSD with older hardware.
- vbernat 5y ago
  Most distributions already don't support a 486 anymore. For example, Debian dropped support for Pentium with Stretch (2017). And support for 486 was dropped in Jessie (2015). 386 support was dropped with Sarge (2005).
  - chalst 5y ago
    Slackware still does, but I think it's the last distribution to do so that still deserves to be called major. http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php
    - hulitu 5y ago
      As far as i know slackware will not boot on a 486 since some time (14.0 ?) because the kernel or glibc is compiled using instructions for later processors.
- frampytown 5y ago
  It's more about whether the kernel retains support for 486. I wonder how many people are still using the platform actively? Or is it just hobbyists at this stage. If no-one is using it I think the kernel devs would drop support. Though perhaps Linus has a soft spot for old x86s specifically :-)
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    AIUI, the Linux kernel only dropped 386 because it was getting unworkable to maintain the SMP code for it. Perhaps support could be reintroduced, limited to single-core machines (no SMP support in the kernel configuration) only. Of course it would mostly be useful as a proof of concept, but the 386 is a very well-understood architecture nowadays so that would definitely have some merit.
factfindingisfn 5y ago
This is one of the major reasons why I love Hacker News because of small side passion projects like this. At Hacker News we don't ask why, we ask why not!
- bshipp 5y ago
  "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  I get real nervous about posting personal retrocomputing projects here to be honest :) I just spent most of my free time in the last week trying to get the Rust compiler to run on a K6-2/500. Had a bunch of trouble because one of the newer x86 extensions (CET) chose opcodes which decode as NOPs, and therefore are considered safe to include in binaries for older processors. Unfortunately, they're only NOPs on i686 or newer, and the K6s are i586 processors. It was mind-numbing because even if you explicitly tell the compiler to output/optimize for a K6-2 or Pentium (-march=k6-2 or -march=pentium) it's still outputting the CET opcodes. You have to pass -fcf-protection=none for them to go away. Super annoying. Benchmarking it was pretty funny, because compiling one of my personal Rust projects is about 500 times slower than my TR 1950X desktop. Compiles in 7.5 seconds on the Threadripper but takes 67 minutes on the K6-2/500. So much progress in 18 years (K6-2/500 in 1999 -> TR 1950X (4 GHz) in 2017).
  - AutumnMeowMeow 5y ago
    This is really cool, even if you didn't post I'm glad you mentioned it in a comment. :) I remember compiling Linux kernel on my Cyrix 486SX 25MHz (the one with a disabled-by-default L1 cache!) and it took an hour. Got it on a P60 and it was like 5 minutes. Good times.
    - Teknoman117 5y ago
      Another one of my silly retro computing projects: https://github.com/teknoman117/m68k-fpga-bridge https://github.com/teknoman117/m68k-fpga-bridge. I wanted to try and make an MMU for it, hence the 68010 specifically (which added some additional data to the bus error exception to allow restarting the failed instruction). I also managed to get someone on utsource to sell me a tray of 386EX33s for like $2 a pop so eventually I can make some 386 systems. I managed to track down a few of the old IIT 3C87 FPUs that had the hardware matrix by vector multiply so I'm going to try to make some 3D renderer if I ever get around to putting it together.
pridkett 5y ago
That’s how I started out running Linux! Downloading a bunch of floppies from a BBS over a 16.8k USR HST modem. It was like a magical world when I first installed it. I also had a giant paper book that explained how to use it. For some reason the vi instructions in the book baffled me, but emacs seemed normal. Six months later I finally got the disks for X11. My mind was blown. Real multitasking - not like DESQView or OS/2.
- rconti 5y ago
  Even though I was installing from HDD (dual boot, as I recall), I had to download disksets at 14.4kbps. I remember setting a kitchen timer for 14 minutes for each ZModem xfer.
- dopeboy 5y ago
  The paper book you had reminds me of the very thick stack of printed papers that is the Gentoo installation guide circa 2005. It was my first foray into Linux and I, for macho reasons, went with Gentoo. I think I gave up after a day, tried Fedora, and settled on Ubuntu.
- timbit42 5y ago
  What wasn't real about OS/2 multitasking? It was pre-emptive, at least on a 386.
  - supernovae 5y ago
    os/2 was preemptive but had that single message queue so some people shrug it off - pretty common issue with computers prior to multi core systems. i ran a bbs on os2 and it was awesome. IBM sponsored my bbs as teamos2 and mustang software sent me wildcat! and i was the first bbs in houston to offer linux for download
ToddWBurgess 5y ago
My first Linux install was in 1994, on a 486DX/2-66 with 8MB of RAM. At the time it was considered standard hardware and Linux ran really well on it.
- hulitu 5y ago
  X was a little slow on my machine with the same config. But after i updated to 12MB RAM X with Fvwm2 was great.
- fortran77 5y ago
  I remember when Linux finally got "good enough" in the early 90s and I switched from SCO Xenix and SCO Unix to Linux. Many people ran Linux on 486 machines. Other than the nostalgia of seeing the old boot loaders and boot screens, there's nothing special about this "feat"
  - gattilorenz 5y ago
    > Many people ran Linux on 486 machines. Other than the nostalgia of seeing the old boot loaders and boot screens, there's nothing special about this "feat" Many people ran Windows on 486. But it was Windows 3.x, or 95 at most. If you managed to get Windows 10 to boot on one, surely that would be a feat...
    - fortran77 5y ago
      Windows 10 was never designed for a 486. Linux was.
      - hoistbypetard 5y ago
        Windows NT was. That has about the same relationship to Windows 10 that the Linux kernels designed for 486 do to modern Linux.
ben7799 5y ago
I had a 486DX laptop that I ran Linux on from about 1995-1999, I probably tossed it around 2001 when the battery was pretty dead and the HDD was dying. In some ways that was some of the best times for Linux on the desktop in my experience. Windows and Mac were such an unreliable mess at that point that Linux seemed very competitive at the time. A lot of the advanced hardware integration in Win/Mac hadn’t happened yet and Linux was very lean and mean and reliable. Both KDE and Gnome appeared in 1997 IIRC and the desktop was decent even if some apps weren’t as good. My machine was 75mhz, 12MB RAM, 250mb HDD, 800x600 color LCD that had poor refresh. It got me through most of my college CS programming projects, though I eventually built a Linux tower too. X was good on that laptop the first few years but was really slow by 1998.
- 300bps 5y ago
  I had a similar machine in 1996 running Slackware as a server for qmail. Hard not to be nostalgic over that time but things are so much better now. One command with AWS CLI and I can spin up a Linux box in 3 seconds today.
  - mmcgaha 5y ago
    Sure, its great now if you want to get actual work done, but which is more fun?
    - xattt 5y ago
      There’s opportunities to open up actual sheep farms if sheep shaving is your thing! :)
- wruza 5y ago
  Yep, everyone had stock-ish pc components and then came winmodems, custom-protocol printers and other oem hardware.
  - asveikau 5y ago
    I was reading a bunch of these comments thinking "winmodems were terrible". Thanks for that. I remember carefully selecting modems. Most of the PCI modems in popular retail shops were winmodems so getting one that used the ISA bus was the first step. But even that was not the safest bet. Online shopping was nothing like it is today, so getting a known good model was more difficult.
jggonz 5y ago
I just remembered compiling an early 2.0.xx kernel on an old 386DX AT&T server that was given to me when I was a teenager in the 90s. It spent hours doing it and I loved watching gcc take several seconds to compile each file! I also recall that the hard drive in that thing must have weighed at least 40lbs. Those were fun days! Here's an eBay item that is pretty much exactly what I had back then: https://www.ebay.com/itm/294597619526?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&campid=5338722076&customid=&toolid=10050 https://www.ebay.com/itm/294597619526?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=...
- knorker 5y ago
  By "hard drive" I assume you mean "computer"? Yeach. Yeah I had two of those when they were being thrown out. MCA was a really horrible bus between ISA and PCI. I recall it not wanting to boot unless you installed drivers for all your cards into the BIOS, or something. So not only did your OS need drivers, but your BIOS did too. I may misremember. Compiling the kernel was basically an overnight operation, IIRC. But yeah they were built like tanks. Even the power switch felt like you were turning the power back on to the fences in Jurassic Park.
  - guenthert 5y ago
    > I may misremember. Yeah, I think you do. > Compiling the kernel was basically an overnight operation, IIRC. When, on what hardware? Who was it who complained that compiling the Linux kernel took always ten minutes, regardless of hardware generation? (which of course, isn't entirely true: https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-linux-kernel https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-linux-kernel) For me, on my 386DX 24Mhz with 8MiB RAM, it took about 20minutes late 92 or early 93 (SLS 1.0 -- pre 1.0 kernel), but I had to leave X11, as otherwise the machine would swap to death.
    - knorker 5y ago
      > When, on what hardware? That may have been later, thus with a bigger kernel, but on older hardware. It was probably 386 and 486s back in maybe 2.0/2.2 kernel era. For the specific machines in question I set up some sort of RAID0 between two 60MB SCSI drives, to be able to do much. The reason I say overnight may be because I had machines with specs like that a few years later than you. I did run Linux to some extent since 1994 (Slackware 2.0), but don't remember the kernel compiling aspects of back then at all. But it's a good point. I was not comparing latest kernel to latest (or even necessarily median) kernel at the time.
h2odragon 5y ago
IDE -> Compact Flash adapters are good for hardware of this era. new CF cards are cheap. Booting from CDROM was still iffy and some BIOS might not like some drives and so on as i recall.
- InvaderFizz 5y ago
  There are three tools useful on machines of this era: 1. The aforementioned IDE/CF adapter. It helps that it's a dumb PCB since CF speaks IDE natively. 2. A Gotek Floppy Emulator (With the FlashFloppy firmware) 3. A SCSI2SD SCSI emulator.
  - DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
    Commenting to save; this is prime advice right here.
    - hoistbypetard 5y ago
      That Gotek looks like gold. I hadn't heard of it before. The CF-IDE and SCSI-SD are super useful on their own, but the Gotek looks like it works in some places that really lack for options.
- accrual 5y ago
  Compact Flash cards are indeed pretty useful in old PCs. One just needs to be careful to buy the "industrial" variants that present themselves as a fixed disk to the system. Some operating systems won't install to common consumer CF cards believing them to be removable disks. A handy tool for booting from CD-ROM is Plop Boot Manager. It installs itself into the boot sector and can manage booting from the disk, CD drive, and even USB on systems that ordinarily wouldn't support it. Plus it can be configured to have a cool animated starfield background... https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html
  - blueflow 5y ago
    This sounds wrong. How can a CF card be recognized as "removable"? Do CF cards exist that support ATAPI?
brian_herman 5y ago
There are easier ways to do this. https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-floppy/ https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-...
- timbit42 5y ago
  That is mentioned and linked to in the article.
gregw2 5y ago
Dating myself here ... I ran Linux on my 386SX black and white LCD laptop (including X windows!) back in the early Slackware days 1992-1994. It was easier to do that back then than now... :) Oh,and a grad student friend of mine warned me in 93... "That Web stuff is addictive"... so I avoided it for another 3-6 months and stuck to FTP sites and a bit of gopher/WAIS. :)
- deepspace 5y ago
  I set up a SLIP (later replaced by PPP) gateway on a 386SX running Slackware, connected to a 14K4 modem back in 1993. It served as our company's main internet gateway until late 1995. The title of this post really had me do a double-take. "Of course Linux can run on a 486, it's fine on a 386". Just need the right version.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Running X in 8 bits with colormap switching was fun. Now everything is 24 bits. Fractint was much cooler in 8 bits ( color cycling). Now obtaining a fractal with a limited number of distinct colors is a challenge.
- drittich 5y ago
  Same, and I remember it was solid as a rock. Took a little while to get the Hayes modem working so it could act as dial-up ISP, but once I did, it never failed. I left it running headless in a server closet - I like to believe it's still running to this day.
- marttt 5y ago
  > "That Web stuff is addictive" Prophetic declaration of the day. I'm envisioning a great hacker t-shirt: "That Web stuff is addictive... stick to FTP (a friend, 1993)"
  - hulitu 5y ago
    I find ftp more addictive. You could find interesting things back in the day (like DEC research papers).
  - 5y ago
jcurbo 5y ago
"But can it run Linux?" Of course it can, 486s were common in Linux's early heyday. During my senior year of high school and freshman year of college ('97-'99) I ran Debian Slink on an IBM 486SX. X ran a little slow on it so I used it in console only mode. I mostly used it to do compsci homework. Before I settled on Debian full-time (still using it to this day) I used Red Hat, I think v5 (the original numbering, before RHEL). And before that probably Slackware on floppies. I eventually got an AMD K6-2 which ran a lot faster... Of course, this article is about running modern Linux, but Debian Slink is still there to download and install and I'm sure it works just peachy. The section on configuring the kernel really gives me nostalgia as I used to build my own kernels back then, something I haven't done in years.
- imoverclocked 5y ago
  Ah, the good ol’ ping of death days.
- themadturk 5y ago
  I ran a 486 as an internal web server in the law office I worked at in the early 2000s. Don't remember any of the system details, but it ran very nicely until at least 2006.
nobleach 5y ago
By the time I got into installing Linux (1996+), I always seemed to be able to find salvageable pentium machines 166Mhz and above. But, my sister ended up returning my old AMD 486 DX4 120Mhz after they bought a new computer. I threw FreeBSD on it for a bit. It ran really well! I'll forever miss this era of computing. The internet was brand new, machines were often Frankensteins built out of spare parts. Computer Shopper was 2 inches thick with a thousand ads for parts from places like Dirt Cheap Drives.
- 13of40 5y ago
  In 1995, I was stationed at an Army base about 10 miles from the DMZ in Korea, and for the first time in my life I saved up enough money to build a computer from modern parts instead of scavenging them from thrift stores and dumpsters. So I went AWOL for a day and went down to a place in Seoul called the Yongsan Electronics Market. To my young American mind, this was a place straight out of a William Gibson novel. Imagine a multi-storey sprawling mall covering about three blocks, with modern stores selling the latest LG stuff at the center, but in the alleys and passageways you might run into a pile of cases being scrapped, or an old man pulling a cart full of dead hard drives, or turn a corner and find someone hand building 20 video cards on a plastic table. But I knew what I was there for, and I bought the parts for a 486DX4/100mhz, plus a used monitor and keyboard, and brought them back on the train. Somewhere I acquired a Slackware Linux CD, and when I got it all put together it was like a dream. I count that era as when CPUs got powerful enough that we just had extra processing power for the little details. But I digress. On the first night I had it, I decided to leave it running overnight and set up a cron job to wake me up for morning formation. Of course, it froze up in the middle of the night and I woke up late and got yelled at.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    I really wish cities in the US had those kind of sprawling electronics markets. So cool and useful. Like if you just need a single SPDT switch instead of a 20 pack on Amazon… you can’t do that right now.
    - 5y ago
immmmmm 5y ago
makes me remember when i installed slackware 1.0 on the family's 386 when my dad bought a fresh 486dx. ah the joy of getting an X server running and recompiling kernel!!
phendrenad2 5y ago
Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386, but because the kernel is a non-modular spaghetti-code mess, they had to deprecate 386 support to fix something else. It's only a matter of time before 486 is gone too.
- zokula 5y ago
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  I like the potential your comment has even though it's wrong on every point, it is interesting to go back and understand why 386 support was removed. Since the days of 386 support, the kernel has only become much more modular and portable. It quite possibly supports more platforms and CPU architectures and families than any other OS ever written. Almost certainly true if you restrict it to a multitasking >= 32-bit OS with memory protection and virtual memory. Many architectures and ports that have been removed or not merged were not due to being technically incapable of supporting the port but due to lack of interest. If 486 support goes away, it won't be because suddenly the code has become unmaintainable after being fine for 25 years since the 486 was obsolete! It will because nobody has a machine to test or verify fixes on (although QEMU has improved this situation), or because the kernel or the x86 port decides to adopt a new feature which is more difficult to implement older CPUs (cmpxchg8b as another post mentioned). So your post is totally misinformed and wrong. So with that out of the way here is the 386 removal changeset: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1212.1/01152.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1212.1/01152.html Net code change is fewer than 400 lines removed, much of it in boilerplate and config options changing. "This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support [which] plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted to change SMP primitives, for years." There were no issues with spaghetti. They can and did maintain it just fine for many years. It was not removed to fix a bug, it was removed for lack of interest in doing the work to maintain it. And the extra work was not because of spaghetti it was because it required independent implementations of SMP primitives. As you see from the code change it was likely not the code itself that was the headache, but the testing of it. > Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386 That's a really strange way to phrase it too. A 386 was the very first thing Linux was written to run on. There is no "technically" about it.

227 points by marttt 5y ago

A few tips! A floppy drive emulator you can load with usb is available now. Pretty sweet device for something like your project. The 36 pin connector on the sound card was probably a scsi cd-rom connector. They used to put them with the sound card :)

SigmundA 5y ago

My first job at computer store in high school I worked without pay initially just to get parts to build a 486-DX with it wonderful floating point unit so I could finally play Falcon 3.0 properly. That same job taught me networking (Novell) and got me programming business apps in MS Access and the rest is history. Unfortunately I didn't get into Linux until much later.

UncleSlacky 5y ago

I did something similar with a Compaq Contura 4/25c about 15-20 years ago. It had 8 Mb RAM so I was able to install Slackware 3.9 (IIRC) via floppies with a standalone X session running Netscape. Later I put Win 95c on it (again, via floppies) which ran fairly well.

axiolite 5y ago
I still have my Contura in a box in a closet. Along with a PCMCIA network card, the docking station and the 20MB RAM upgrade. Used it up until ~2010 when I got a similarly tiny and inexpensive EeePC. Was a nice small, cheap system that worked well enough as a dumb serial/telnet/ssh terminal for network management tasks. It was only a little bit slow to start an SSH session. Even started up fast with Linux or FreeBSD. OpenBSD was rather slow to boot. I didn't have much reason to bother with X11. Text utilities always got the job done, including for web browsing needs thanks to links.

rconti 5y ago

Apparently they meant to say "modern Linux on a 486SX" as, obviously, Linux ran just fine on a 486 back when all this stuff was new. (Mine was a 486DX/33, but with 4GB of RAM. Compiling a kernel took 8 hours, but I digress.)

fmakunbound 5y ago
> a 486DX/33, but with 4GB of RAM Wonder how long it took to sequentially scan 4GB of RAM
- tudorconstantin 5y ago
  I think it was 4MB. I think there weren't too many 4GB HDDs back then
vidarh 5y ago
Yeah, 486's with 16MB RAM were our default X terminals at the time, and it worked quite well.

noufalibrahim 5y ago

This is really nice. I once got a hold of an old Pentium when I had just started work and wanted to get Linux to work on it. It had 3.5" drives and no CD drive. I used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuLinux and got a basic system working without much hassle. I believe it even had a minimal X server running with twm or something. Enough to work on. I still maintain that after hardware ages a little, Linux (and perhaps other free operating systems and distros) are the only way to give a soul to the machine.

dmitrygr 5y ago

I played this slimming-modern-linux-down game recently on a MIPS device. Getting it below 4MB is hard...too much cruft has accumulated in it.

MailNerd 5y ago

It's amazing how few resources a Linux (or BSD) server requires. I have a twenty year old desktop machine (quality Fujitsu Siemens hardware but nothing unusal) reimaged as a storage/playground server and it's just fast enough. Can also handle some 18 TB storage.

Teknoman117 5y ago

I really wish I didn't give away the Dell 316LT I came across a number of years ago (~2008?) at a swap meet. I had the whole kit - 386SX16, 8 MB of RAM, extra screens, the manuals, an external 5.25" drive, and all the diagnostic disks. But, my parents were moving us from a large house in Alabama to a small apartment in California and we didn't have the space for most of my parts (cough e-waste cough) collection. Teenage me had no idea what to do with it. I didn't know how to compile a Linux kernel from source, at that point I'd barely started moving beyond Atmel AVRs and Java on LEGO Mindstorms.

djur 5y ago

Wow, this is exactly the same type of computer (all-in-one Compaq Presario 486) that I first installed Linux on. Slackware 3.x, if I recall correctly, disk images downloaded at 14.4kbps and loaded onto every spare floppy I could find. I don't think I even got X11 going because that was a lot more disks!

lost_soul 5y ago

Linux taught me about computers and it taught me about politics. I worked at a university where the demand for Internet far exceeded the capabilities of the network. While a filtering bridge may reduce broadcast storms to an acceptable level, it also permitted the administration to delay much needed upgrades.

Prolixium 5y ago

This post makes me want to roll my own Linux kernel again. I used to build vanilla kernels on Slackware (2.2.x!) and then Gentoo a /long/ time ago as well as modify stock Debian kernels to remove stuff I didn't need and tweak some knobs as of just a few years ago. I feel like it's almost required to page through the various dialogs in menuconfig periodically in order to stay current when it comes to modern hardware and how it can interact with the OS.

flyinghamster 5y ago

I have a couple of things from bygone Linux days: a retail copy of Red Hat 5.1 (pre-RHEL), and a 6-CD InfoMagic compilation. The latter was especially handy back before cable modems came to town. I recall downloading an earlier Slackware, one floppy image at a time, over 14.4K dialup when 14.4K was fast, and it still took forever. The InfoMagic discs: Disc 1: Slackware 3.0 and Debian 0.93R6 Disc 2: Red Hat 3.0.3 for x86 Disc 3: Archive of sunsite.unc.edu Disc 4: GNU source archive from prep.ai.mit.edu Disc 5: Archive of tsx-11.mit.edu Disc 6: Demos and Red Hat 2.1 for Alpha

Teknoman117 5y ago

Super neat! I went through the same process for some AM5x86-133 industrial computers with 32 MiB of RAM. I didn't think to change PHYSICAL_START or use musl. It's usually set at the 16 MiB mark so that the kernel doesn't consume any of the memory in the ISA DMA / ISA device zone. One thing I would recommend that I didn't see mentioned is switching to the SLOB allocator in the kernel. It's more space efficient than SLUB or SLAB, but it is slower if you have a large amount of memory. (It's hidden unless you set CONFIG_EXPERT). The main problem I bumped into for minifying a modern Linux kernel is that so much of the modern Linux ecosystem (systemd, OpenRC, runit, etc.) expects a lot of the networking stack to be enabled, along with cgroups, namespaces, etc. In order to get a minimal Gentoo i486 image to boot, I needed to turn a lot of things on in the tinyconfig kernel. Admittedly, it's hard to image a Linux/Unix system without some form of networking :)

anthk 5y ago
OpenWRT would be "easier", but you must find the kernel configs and CFLAGS for i486 by yourself.

jll29 5y ago

This evoked fond memories of the first time Linux boots up with X11 (startx&) after installing SLS twice from 50 3.5" disks (the first round saw one disk cause a read error necessitating another trip to the nearest university). Ran like a breeze on a 486DX-33 with 4 MB RAM, xeyes and all. Hard to be believe at the time - a UNIX in my own room! :-O

caseyf 5y ago

all of those Slackware floppies and an Acermate 386SX/20

miskin 5y ago

We ran our Java Users Group website in 1998 on 486SX with 16MB of RAM. It was running Slackware and website was served by Apache + JServ (this was before Tomcat existed) + MySQL. When I was sitting in the office where the "server" was located, I could hear when we had visitors - HDD was frantically swapping to switch between Apache and MySQL. It's hard to compare to the luxury we have with servers today.

int_19h 5y ago

For easy-to-setup modern networking on hardware this old, consider using a WiFi modem such as this: https://www.tindie.com/products/theoldnet/rs232-serial-wifi-modem-for-vintage-computers-v3/ https://www.tindie.com/products/theoldnet/rs232-serial-wifi-... In short, these let you connect to WiFi using AT commands, and then "dial" IP addresses and hostnames as if they were phone numbers.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

My first x86 machine (after running a 68000 Atari ST for years before) was a 486DX50 and I ran the first versions of Linux (pre-ELF), 1993ish, installing off floppy, downloaded via 9600 baud modem. Dual booted with Windows 3.1 and DOS. It's nice to see recent kernel versions can still work fairly well on this hardware. I don't recall my boot times being as long as 50s though. But who knows, it was a different time and expectations were different. I had 8MB RAM and a 200MB drive and while there was swapping, I was able to run X11, emacs, Mosaic (and then Netscape), and some terminals without serious problems.

Threeve303 5y ago

Installing Red Hat 3 and 4 was always a fun experience

mysterydip 5y ago

Awesome and thanks for documenting the process! There's large DOS communities with people running vintage hardware, but not much I know of for linux.

saint_angels 5y ago
I think running a vintage DOS system is popular because there is a lot of DOS games. Linux doesn't have as much hardware/OS-dependent nostalgic software.
axiolite 5y ago
With DOS, there are lots of reasons you'd NEED to run an ancient OS on ancient hardware. Of course emulation provides some more options... With Linux, you can just keep your ancient programs and hardware running on modern systems.

nousermane 5y ago

Few months ago, somebody did a series of live streaming events on bringing up a 486-based tablet PC (which happened to be an old voting machine) with modern linux. Kernel turned out to be the easy part. Booting grub from BIOS that doesn't support LBA addressing (CHS only) - a bit harder. Running X11 on hardware without PCI - ridiculously hard: https://diode.zone/w/kMhja4oBUvP6CScsiDZP38 https://diode.zone/w/kMhja4oBUvP6CScsiDZP38

hulitu 5y ago
From some time X is a moving target. It's better if you can run XFree86 on old hardware.
anthk 5y ago
Try Delicate Linux. Compile Libressl, then install it at /opt/libressl and recompile Lynx against libressl with CFLAGS="-I/opt/libressl/include" LDFLAGS="-L/opt/libressl/lib" ./configure; make; sudo make install. Try gopher://hngopher.com first and later, https://news.ycombinator.com https://news.ycombinator.com
HeckFeck 5y ago
Perhaps this was addressed in the video, but I wonder if that tinkerer tried LILO? It is still supported and might fare better with old hardware.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- morganvachon 5y ago
  Indeed, Slackware still defaults to LILO/eLILO and it works perfectly fine on modern hardware, older hardware from LILO's heyday should be no issue at all. I still hang on to a PIII based Dell Latitude laptop from 2001 and Slackware -current runs surprisingly well on it (along with BeOS 5.1 from my original disc, QNX RTOS, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and a few other obscure OSes from its generation to today).
  - 5y ago

outsidein 5y ago

Remember the days back in 90‘ (Must have been 1994) when installing Slackware distribution on 486 DX from about 15 floppy disks to the internal HDD. Had running Linux as web proxy until about 2001. Interesting to see that what was quite normal at that time has become to a topic of interest again.

outsidein 5y ago
To add a fun story where Linux saved my live. Back in the 90‘ we had a Clipper / dBASE based DOS app used for capturing orders in a call center after TV commercials. In this case a prime TV show to generate donations. Full house with >100 agents busy. Then the Novell Netware server crashed, and was unable to mount the disks. We managed to switch the users to an older server so they could continue to work. But it first seemed the HDD and files got corrupted and unrecoverable by disk tools from Netware. We thought of using a commercial recovery service, but this would cause delay and cost $$$$. So I removed the disks from Netware, fired up a Linux PC, connected the HDD to the Adaptec SCSI (Luckily install prior for a CD drive). The file system was not mountable, but something like dd /dev/sdb1 |strings „JJJJMMDD“ discovered lots of salvage records. This literally saved my ass and the company.
- outsidein 5y ago
  Last year I finally ditched some spare i386 CPU and memory modules (sort of 1, 2, 4 MByte) after getting no response on eBay.
- outsidein 5y ago
  The HP Laserjet 2100 M (PCL and PostScript) is still running. Someone interested into the original PCL Language book which came with the printer?
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    Be aware that these old HP printers consume a rather large amount of energy no matter whether they are in use or in standby.

chasil 5y ago

I have an old Am586 in a drawer that I could send this guy. At least he would have a math coprocessor.

readingnews 5y ago

Ah, those were the days. There is a long list of dmesg outputs from linux on many old systems, while not as old as the 486, there is an AMD K6/2... and sparcs! http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg_index.html http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg_index.html The TRI-m in that list was a 486, although not modern linux. http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg/dmesg_machz.html http://www.dimlight.org/number9/dmesg/dmesg_machz.html

HeckFeck 5y ago

In ~2006 I was gifted a 486 desktop by my neighbour, it was a Mitac 486 running Windows 3.1 and DOS. It came with a matching VGA monitor. It had a floppy drive, 160MB hard disk and DIN keyboard. The mouse was fitted to a serial port. There was no sound card; sound was achieved by a driver that somehow bunged PCM through the PC speaker. Unfortunately it didn't survive a household clear out 3 years later, and that fills me with regret. Maybe I could've been trying my own projects on it now. I always liked the relative simplicity of the OS and hardware.

inglor_cz 5y ago
With a certain nostalgia, I remember playing MIDs through the PC speaker back in the 286 days. From 5,25" floppy disks no less.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rasengan 5y ago

I ran Linux on a 486 DX for quite some time including providing shells to people on IRC. Don't run X and it's more than powerful enough.

anthk 5y ago
With SVGALib and now framebuffer you can run image and PDF viewers. Videos, well, maybe from a Pentium and up with MPEG movies.
vidarh 5y ago
A 486 can handle X just fine. 486's were our main X11 desktop machines at the office in the mid 90's (it has been the year of Linux on the desktop for me since 1995). The challenge is more that most modern X clients won't play well with a slow, memory constrained machine.
- anthk 5y ago
  Damn Small Linux ran fine under a 486. I liked the black fluxbox theme.
- sobkas 5y ago
  > A 486 can handle X just fine. 486's were our main X11 desktop machines at the office in the mid 90's (it has been the year of Linux on the desktop for me since 1995). The challenge is more that most modern X clients won't play well with a slow, memory constrained machine. I remember when X switched from monolithic server to modular one. I had to buy new GPU because S3 I had wasn't supported. I have bought ATI.

chalst 5y ago

It's pretty cool to get an up-to-date Linux working on such old hardware but I get the impression this kind of thing is going to get harder to do with the major distributions dropping support for 32 bit x86. I've been using NetBSD with older hardware.

vbernat 5y ago
Most distributions already don't support a 486 anymore. For example, Debian dropped support for Pentium with Stretch (2017). And support for 486 was dropped in Jessie (2015). 386 support was dropped with Sarge (2005).
- chalst 5y ago
  Slackware still does, but I think it's the last distribution to do so that still deserves to be called major. http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php http://www.slackware.com/install/sysreq.php
  - hulitu 5y ago
    As far as i know slackware will not boot on a 486 since some time (14.0 ?) because the kernel or glibc is compiled using instructions for later processors.
frampytown 5y ago
It's more about whether the kernel retains support for 486. I wonder how many people are still using the platform actively? Or is it just hobbyists at this stage. If no-one is using it I think the kernel devs would drop support. Though perhaps Linus has a soft spot for old x86s specifically :-)
- zozbot234 5y ago
  AIUI, the Linux kernel only dropped 386 because it was getting unworkable to maintain the SMP code for it. Perhaps support could be reintroduced, limited to single-core machines (no SMP support in the kernel configuration) only. Of course it would mostly be useful as a proof of concept, but the 386 is a very well-understood architecture nowadays so that would definitely have some merit.

factfindingisfn 5y ago

This is one of the major reasons why I love Hacker News because of small side passion projects like this. At Hacker News we don't ask why, we ask why not!

bshipp 5y ago
"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
Teknoman117 5y ago
I get real nervous about posting personal retrocomputing projects here to be honest :) I just spent most of my free time in the last week trying to get the Rust compiler to run on a K6-2/500. Had a bunch of trouble because one of the newer x86 extensions (CET) chose opcodes which decode as NOPs, and therefore are considered safe to include in binaries for older processors. Unfortunately, they're only NOPs on i686 or newer, and the K6s are i586 processors. It was mind-numbing because even if you explicitly tell the compiler to output/optimize for a K6-2 or Pentium (-march=k6-2 or -march=pentium) it's still outputting the CET opcodes. You have to pass -fcf-protection=none for them to go away. Super annoying. Benchmarking it was pretty funny, because compiling one of my personal Rust projects is about 500 times slower than my TR 1950X desktop. Compiles in 7.5 seconds on the Threadripper but takes 67 minutes on the K6-2/500. So much progress in 18 years (K6-2/500 in 1999 -> TR 1950X (4 GHz) in 2017).
- AutumnMeowMeow 5y ago
  This is really cool, even if you didn't post I'm glad you mentioned it in a comment. :) I remember compiling Linux kernel on my Cyrix 486SX 25MHz (the one with a disabled-by-default L1 cache!) and it took an hour. Got it on a P60 and it was like 5 minutes. Good times.
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    Another one of my silly retro computing projects: https://github.com/teknoman117/m68k-fpga-bridge https://github.com/teknoman117/m68k-fpga-bridge. I wanted to try and make an MMU for it, hence the 68010 specifically (which added some additional data to the bus error exception to allow restarting the failed instruction). I also managed to get someone on utsource to sell me a tray of 386EX33s for like $2 a pop so eventually I can make some 386 systems. I managed to track down a few of the old IIT 3C87 FPUs that had the hardware matrix by vector multiply so I'm going to try to make some 3D renderer if I ever get around to putting it together.

pridkett 5y ago

That’s how I started out running Linux! Downloading a bunch of floppies from a BBS over a 16.8k USR HST modem. It was like a magical world when I first installed it. I also had a giant paper book that explained how to use it. For some reason the vi instructions in the book baffled me, but emacs seemed normal. Six months later I finally got the disks for X11. My mind was blown. Real multitasking - not like DESQView or OS/2.

rconti 5y ago
Even though I was installing from HDD (dual boot, as I recall), I had to download disksets at 14.4kbps. I remember setting a kitchen timer for 14 minutes for each ZModem xfer.
dopeboy 5y ago
The paper book you had reminds me of the very thick stack of printed papers that is the Gentoo installation guide circa 2005. It was my first foray into Linux and I, for macho reasons, went with Gentoo. I think I gave up after a day, tried Fedora, and settled on Ubuntu.
timbit42 5y ago
What wasn't real about OS/2 multitasking? It was pre-emptive, at least on a 386.
- supernovae 5y ago
  os/2 was preemptive but had that single message queue so some people shrug it off - pretty common issue with computers prior to multi core systems. i ran a bbs on os2 and it was awesome. IBM sponsored my bbs as teamos2 and mustang software sent me wildcat! and i was the first bbs in houston to offer linux for download

ToddWBurgess 5y ago

My first Linux install was in 1994, on a 486DX/2-66 with 8MB of RAM. At the time it was considered standard hardware and Linux ran really well on it.

hulitu 5y ago
X was a little slow on my machine with the same config. But after i updated to 12MB RAM X with Fvwm2 was great.
fortran77 5y ago
I remember when Linux finally got "good enough" in the early 90s and I switched from SCO Xenix and SCO Unix to Linux. Many people ran Linux on 486 machines. Other than the nostalgia of seeing the old boot loaders and boot screens, there's nothing special about this "feat"
- gattilorenz 5y ago
  > Many people ran Linux on 486 machines. Other than the nostalgia of seeing the old boot loaders and boot screens, there's nothing special about this "feat" Many people ran Windows on 486. But it was Windows 3.x, or 95 at most. If you managed to get Windows 10 to boot on one, surely that would be a feat...
  - fortran77 5y ago
    Windows 10 was never designed for a 486. Linux was.
    - hoistbypetard 5y ago
      Windows NT was. That has about the same relationship to Windows 10 that the Linux kernels designed for 486 do to modern Linux.

ben7799 5y ago

I had a 486DX laptop that I ran Linux on from about 1995-1999, I probably tossed it around 2001 when the battery was pretty dead and the HDD was dying. In some ways that was some of the best times for Linux on the desktop in my experience. Windows and Mac were such an unreliable mess at that point that Linux seemed very competitive at the time. A lot of the advanced hardware integration in Win/Mac hadn’t happened yet and Linux was very lean and mean and reliable. Both KDE and Gnome appeared in 1997 IIRC and the desktop was decent even if some apps weren’t as good. My machine was 75mhz, 12MB RAM, 250mb HDD, 800x600 color LCD that had poor refresh. It got me through most of my college CS programming projects, though I eventually built a Linux tower too. X was good on that laptop the first few years but was really slow by 1998.

300bps 5y ago
I had a similar machine in 1996 running Slackware as a server for qmail. Hard not to be nostalgic over that time but things are so much better now. One command with AWS CLI and I can spin up a Linux box in 3 seconds today.
- mmcgaha 5y ago
  Sure, its great now if you want to get actual work done, but which is more fun?
  - xattt 5y ago
    There’s opportunities to open up actual sheep farms if sheep shaving is your thing! :)
wruza 5y ago
Yep, everyone had stock-ish pc components and then came winmodems, custom-protocol printers and other oem hardware.
- asveikau 5y ago
  I was reading a bunch of these comments thinking "winmodems were terrible". Thanks for that. I remember carefully selecting modems. Most of the PCI modems in popular retail shops were winmodems so getting one that used the ISA bus was the first step. But even that was not the safest bet. Online shopping was nothing like it is today, so getting a known good model was more difficult.

jggonz 5y ago

I just remembered compiling an early 2.0.xx kernel on an old 386DX AT&T server that was given to me when I was a teenager in the 90s. It spent hours doing it and I loved watching gcc take several seconds to compile each file! I also recall that the hard drive in that thing must have weighed at least 40lbs. Those were fun days! Here's an eBay item that is pretty much exactly what I had back then: https://www.ebay.com/itm/294597619526?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&campid=5338722076&customid=&toolid=10050 https://www.ebay.com/itm/294597619526?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=...

knorker 5y ago
By "hard drive" I assume you mean "computer"? Yeach. Yeah I had two of those when they were being thrown out. MCA was a really horrible bus between ISA and PCI. I recall it not wanting to boot unless you installed drivers for all your cards into the BIOS, or something. So not only did your OS need drivers, but your BIOS did too. I may misremember. Compiling the kernel was basically an overnight operation, IIRC. But yeah they were built like tanks. Even the power switch felt like you were turning the power back on to the fences in Jurassic Park.
- guenthert 5y ago
  > I may misremember. Yeah, I think you do. > Compiling the kernel was basically an overnight operation, IIRC. When, on what hardware? Who was it who complained that compiling the Linux kernel took always ten minutes, regardless of hardware generation? (which of course, isn't entirely true: https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-linux-kernel https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-linux-kernel) For me, on my 386DX 24Mhz with 8MiB RAM, it took about 20minutes late 92 or early 93 (SLS 1.0 -- pre 1.0 kernel), but I had to leave X11, as otherwise the machine would swap to death.
  - knorker 5y ago
    > When, on what hardware? That may have been later, thus with a bigger kernel, but on older hardware. It was probably 386 and 486s back in maybe 2.0/2.2 kernel era. For the specific machines in question I set up some sort of RAID0 between two 60MB SCSI drives, to be able to do much. The reason I say overnight may be because I had machines with specs like that a few years later than you. I did run Linux to some extent since 1994 (Slackware 2.0), but don't remember the kernel compiling aspects of back then at all. But it's a good point. I was not comparing latest kernel to latest (or even necessarily median) kernel at the time.

h2odragon 5y ago

IDE -> Compact Flash adapters are good for hardware of this era. new CF cards are cheap. Booting from CDROM was still iffy and some BIOS might not like some drives and so on as i recall.

InvaderFizz 5y ago
There are three tools useful on machines of this era: 1. The aforementioned IDE/CF adapter. It helps that it's a dumb PCB since CF speaks IDE natively. 2. A Gotek Floppy Emulator (With the FlashFloppy firmware) 3. A SCSI2SD SCSI emulator.
- DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
  Commenting to save; this is prime advice right here.
  - hoistbypetard 5y ago
    That Gotek looks like gold. I hadn't heard of it before. The CF-IDE and SCSI-SD are super useful on their own, but the Gotek looks like it works in some places that really lack for options.
accrual 5y ago
Compact Flash cards are indeed pretty useful in old PCs. One just needs to be careful to buy the "industrial" variants that present themselves as a fixed disk to the system. Some operating systems won't install to common consumer CF cards believing them to be removable disks. A handy tool for booting from CD-ROM is Plop Boot Manager. It installs itself into the boot sector and can manage booting from the disk, CD drive, and even USB on systems that ordinarily wouldn't support it. Plus it can be configured to have a cool animated starfield background... https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html
- blueflow 5y ago
  This sounds wrong. How can a CF card be recognized as "removable"? Do CF cards exist that support ATAPI?

brian_herman 5y ago

There are easier ways to do this. https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-floppy/ https://bits.p1x.in/floppinux-an-embedded-linux-on-a-single-...

timbit42 5y ago
That is mentioned and linked to in the article.

gregw2 5y ago

Dating myself here ... I ran Linux on my 386SX black and white LCD laptop (including X windows!) back in the early Slackware days 1992-1994. It was easier to do that back then than now... :) Oh,and a grad student friend of mine warned me in 93... "That Web stuff is addictive"... so I avoided it for another 3-6 months and stuck to FTP sites and a bit of gopher/WAIS. :)

deepspace 5y ago
I set up a SLIP (later replaced by PPP) gateway on a 386SX running Slackware, connected to a 14K4 modem back in 1993. It served as our company's main internet gateway until late 1995. The title of this post really had me do a double-take. "Of course Linux can run on a 486, it's fine on a 386". Just need the right version.
hulitu 5y ago
Running X in 8 bits with colormap switching was fun. Now everything is 24 bits. Fractint was much cooler in 8 bits ( color cycling). Now obtaining a fractal with a limited number of distinct colors is a challenge.
drittich 5y ago
Same, and I remember it was solid as a rock. Took a little while to get the Hayes modem working so it could act as dial-up ISP, but once I did, it never failed. I left it running headless in a server closet - I like to believe it's still running to this day.
marttt 5y ago
> "That Web stuff is addictive" Prophetic declaration of the day. I'm envisioning a great hacker t-shirt: "That Web stuff is addictive... stick to FTP (a friend, 1993)"
- hulitu 5y ago
  I find ftp more addictive. You could find interesting things back in the day (like DEC research papers).
- 5y ago

jcurbo 5y ago

"But can it run Linux?" Of course it can, 486s were common in Linux's early heyday. During my senior year of high school and freshman year of college ('97-'99) I ran Debian Slink on an IBM 486SX. X ran a little slow on it so I used it in console only mode. I mostly used it to do compsci homework. Before I settled on Debian full-time (still using it to this day) I used Red Hat, I think v5 (the original numbering, before RHEL). And before that probably Slackware on floppies. I eventually got an AMD K6-2 which ran a lot faster... Of course, this article is about running modern Linux, but Debian Slink is still there to download and install and I'm sure it works just peachy. The section on configuring the kernel really gives me nostalgia as I used to build my own kernels back then, something I haven't done in years.

imoverclocked 5y ago
Ah, the good ol’ ping of death days.
themadturk 5y ago
I ran a 486 as an internal web server in the law office I worked at in the early 2000s. Don't remember any of the system details, but it ran very nicely until at least 2006.

nobleach 5y ago

By the time I got into installing Linux (1996+), I always seemed to be able to find salvageable pentium machines 166Mhz and above. But, my sister ended up returning my old AMD 486 DX4 120Mhz after they bought a new computer. I threw FreeBSD on it for a bit. It ran really well! I'll forever miss this era of computing. The internet was brand new, machines were often Frankensteins built out of spare parts. Computer Shopper was 2 inches thick with a thousand ads for parts from places like Dirt Cheap Drives.

13of40 5y ago
In 1995, I was stationed at an Army base about 10 miles from the DMZ in Korea, and for the first time in my life I saved up enough money to build a computer from modern parts instead of scavenging them from thrift stores and dumpsters. So I went AWOL for a day and went down to a place in Seoul called the Yongsan Electronics Market. To my young American mind, this was a place straight out of a William Gibson novel. Imagine a multi-storey sprawling mall covering about three blocks, with modern stores selling the latest LG stuff at the center, but in the alleys and passageways you might run into a pile of cases being scrapped, or an old man pulling a cart full of dead hard drives, or turn a corner and find someone hand building 20 video cards on a plastic table. But I knew what I was there for, and I bought the parts for a 486DX4/100mhz, plus a used monitor and keyboard, and brought them back on the train. Somewhere I acquired a Slackware Linux CD, and when I got it all put together it was like a dream. I count that era as when CPUs got powerful enough that we just had extra processing power for the little details. But I digress. On the first night I had it, I decided to leave it running overnight and set up a cron job to wake me up for morning formation. Of course, it froze up in the middle of the night and I woke up late and got yelled at.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  I really wish cities in the US had those kind of sprawling electronics markets. So cool and useful. Like if you just need a single SPDT switch instead of a 20 pack on Amazon… you can’t do that right now.
  - 5y ago

immmmmm 5y ago

makes me remember when i installed slackware 1.0 on the family's 386 when my dad bought a fresh 486dx. ah the joy of getting an X server running and recompiling kernel!!

phendrenad2 5y ago

Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386, but because the kernel is a non-modular spaghetti-code mess, they had to deprecate 386 support to fix something else. It's only a matter of time before 486 is gone too.

zokula 5y ago
throwawaylinux 5y ago
I like the potential your comment has even though it's wrong on every point, it is interesting to go back and understand why 386 support was removed. Since the days of 386 support, the kernel has only become much more modular and portable. It quite possibly supports more platforms and CPU architectures and families than any other OS ever written. Almost certainly true if you restrict it to a multitasking >= 32-bit OS with memory protection and virtual memory. Many architectures and ports that have been removed or not merged were not due to being technically incapable of supporting the port but due to lack of interest. If 486 support goes away, it won't be because suddenly the code has become unmaintainable after being fine for 25 years since the 486 was obsolete! It will because nobody has a machine to test or verify fixes on (although QEMU has improved this situation), or because the kernel or the x86 port decides to adopt a new feature which is more difficult to implement older CPUs (cmpxchg8b as another post mentioned). So your post is totally misinformed and wrong. So with that out of the way here is the 386 removal changeset: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1212.1/01152.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1212.1/01152.html Net code change is fewer than 400 lines removed, much of it in boilerplate and config options changing. "This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support [which] plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted to change SMP primitives, for years." There were no issues with spaghetti. They can and did maintain it just fine for many years. It was not removed to fix a bug, it was removed for lack of interest in doing the work to maintain it. And the extra work was not because of spaghetti it was because it required independent implementations of SMP primitives. As you see from the code change it was likely not the code itself that was the headache, but the testing of it. > Technically Linux could once upon a time run on a 386 That's a really strange way to phrase it too. A 386 was the very first thing Linux was written to run on. There is no "technically" about it.