4 ms·

Great! But don't expect much for now. But personally, I'm happy with result, because I'm able to deploy dos machines with bigger HDDs (with help of XTIDE bios -

Great! But don't expect much for now. But personally, I'm happy with result, because I'm able to deploy dos machines with bigger HDDs (with help of XTIDE bios - still playing around) or just put dos images to HDDs via network without too much time spend with real hw. Don't get me wrong. I really like real hw but prepare basic machine setup is soooo convenient in virtual environment nowadays. Also, booting real 386 via network... My childhood dreams come true ;P.

helf 4y ago
Yes! I can’t wait to try it out soon. I have an NE2000 ISA NIC in mine. So I’ll be able to give that a go. I’ve been wanting to do some upgrades to it for awhile so now I have an excuse xD
helf 4y ago
Btw, what are you future plans? Do you plan on an X system or?
- marmolak 4y ago
  X would be great addition. Someone here point me to linux distro for 486 machines with working X. However, I don't think it will be bootable from network with full X window and window manager support. So I need to find a way how to use network storage. BTW: only few ethernet cards are supported now (3com fan here ;)). Maybe I can enable support for NE2000 compatible clones, because it was very common.
- marmolak 4y ago
  And another plan is to review my patches for 3.7.10 kernel, because it's just bunch of hacks and I still learn much more from work on them. Basically, main goal has been: make machine with 3COM card with lanworks proprietary boot rom boots from network on old machine... but what do I going to boot? As a side effect of this effort were gray486linux born (yep. It was first). After some issues (CET instructions emited by gcc aka multinop instructions not supported by i486) it finally booted. Then... how hard it can be to do the same on 386 machine ;P. It was harder and I learned tons of stuff during the process. Also. I would like to have something small which still can be booted over network and I can deploy prepared base images with DOS/Windows 3.11 etc... just that easy (with help of Ontrack or XTIDE bios). Or I can deploy prepared Windows NT 4.0, because it looks like my SCSI cdrom died on one of my machines. But if you have some ideas what to do with it, don't hesitate and let me know.

helf 4y ago

Yes! I can’t wait to try it out soon. I have an NE2000 ISA NIC in mine. So I’ll be able to give that a go. I’ve been wanting to do some upgrades to it for awhile so now I have an excuse xD

helf 4y ago

Btw, what are you future plans? Do you plan on an X system or?

marmolak 4y ago
X would be great addition. Someone here point me to linux distro for 486 machines with working X. However, I don't think it will be bootable from network with full X window and window manager support. So I need to find a way how to use network storage. BTW: only few ethernet cards are supported now (3com fan here ;)). Maybe I can enable support for NE2000 compatible clones, because it was very common.
marmolak 4y ago
And another plan is to review my patches for 3.7.10 kernel, because it's just bunch of hacks and I still learn much more from work on them. Basically, main goal has been: make machine with 3COM card with lanworks proprietary boot rom boots from network on old machine... but what do I going to boot? As a side effect of this effort were gray486linux born (yep. It was first). After some issues (CET instructions emited by gcc aka multinop instructions not supported by i486) it finally booted. Then... how hard it can be to do the same on 386 machine ;P. It was harder and I learned tons of stuff during the process. Also. I would like to have something small which still can be booted over network and I can deploy prepared base images with DOS/Windows 3.11 etc... just that easy (with help of Ontrack or XTIDE bios). Or I can deploy prepared Windows NT 4.0, because it looks like my SCSI cdrom died on one of my machines. But if you have some ideas what to do with it, don't hesitate and let me know.