My first computer was a Gateway2000 486/DX 33MHz. I think it was the same one that Linus developed on. It had a programmable keyboard, and a 14.4 modem. You had to enter the video card clock timings manually to run X.
I installed the SLS linux distribution on about 50 3.5 inch floppy disks. I think disk 33 was corrupt. Programming was such an adventure back then. I miss those days.
wormius · 25m ago
Haha i had a 486/dx2-66 laptop and my first try using linux was in 1997 with Debian Bo, IIRC. Downloading over 28.8 modem (maybe it was 56k at that point?) took a LOOOOOONG time, and then trying to get XFree86 to work was no luck with that chipset, even thought it was an IBM computer. It didn't help that the only source of info was the computer itself so getting online in text mode with a usenet client to ask questions and then try to reboot and fail and getting back online etc.
It's amazing how far we've come with video drivers.
sound drivers on the other hand.
os2warpman · 2h ago
While the kernel supports 486, we need to be honest with ourselves.
Anything older than a Pentium II/III based on the 440-series platform is "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".
On an actual, physical i486 systems, you run into so many problems that it is unusable.
Even on embedded systems where a 486 core was thrown into a SoC and "modern" I/O was bolted on you often spend more time troubleshooting problems than you would spend moving the entire product to a newer architecture.
terinjokes · 1h ago
I just reinstalled Gentoo this past weekend on an IBM ThinkPad with a Pentium 4/M and 256MiB of RAM, and even there it's probably "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".
Most of Linux worked, to it's credit, though I needed to tweak libata for some IDE controller quirks presumably lost in the PATA driver transition in 2.6.20. VTs worked fine and KMSCON worked well, once I loaded the radeonfb driver in initrd.
Where it noticibly falls apart is trying to being up X11, as the driver stack in X11 and Mesa have bitrotten (and in Mesa's case, removed, and no one is looking at mesa-amber from what I understand). A lightweight tiling manager and urxvt was enough for it to crash the whole system.
snovymgodym · 51m ago
Is there much use of 32-bit only x86 hardware in the wild anymore? Genuinely curious, I wouldn't be surprised if there was since it was so ubiquitous for a decade or two.
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rhelz · 1h ago
Ah the good old days. I remember one of my computer architecture/compiler professors at Purdue chiding us for trashing Intel, pointing out that the 486 was quite comparable in performance to the snazzy new RISCs which were in fashion.
I installed the SLS linux distribution on about 50 3.5 inch floppy disks. I think disk 33 was corrupt. Programming was such an adventure back then. I miss those days.
It's amazing how far we've come with video drivers.
sound drivers on the other hand.
Anything older than a Pentium II/III based on the 440-series platform is "supported" not "Supported (green checkmark emoji)".
On an actual, physical i486 systems, you run into so many problems that it is unusable.
Even on embedded systems where a 486 core was thrown into a SoC and "modern" I/O was bolted on you often spend more time troubleshooting problems than you would spend moving the entire product to a newer architecture.
Most of Linux worked, to it's credit, though I needed to tweak libata for some IDE controller quirks presumably lost in the PATA driver transition in 2.6.20. VTs worked fine and KMSCON worked well, once I loaded the radeonfb driver in initrd.
Where it noticibly falls apart is trying to being up X11, as the driver stack in X11 and Mesa have bitrotten (and in Mesa's case, removed, and no one is looking at mesa-amber from what I understand). A lightweight tiling manager and urxvt was enough for it to crash the whole system.
No comments yet