elod wrote:Forget about ISA. If you care about graphics an S3 is best, on PCI or AGP.
On a 386SX? Please do tell us where to get a 386SX motherboard with PCI and AGP 😵
There's also not much you can do under Linux. There were some ported games but a bit later (Soldier of Fortune era).
There is more in life than games alone. That said, three letters: MUD. People were gaming on Unix before the first PC was made. No, don't expect flashy graphics, but once again, this is a 386SX...
I'd rather try something a bit more odd but useful: OS/2.
More useful than Linux? The whole idea of running Linux is running a modern OS on the old hardware. OS/2 is long dead. Good fun though - my first PC was a 386-16 and ran OS2 1.1.
Linux on old hardware is more like dysfunctional 😀. Remember that in DOS the software you run grabs all the hardware, the OS and it's (few) services do not matter as much. Not the case under Linux.
Resources are an issue. However if you keep it really minimal, that's not as bad as it sounds, particularly as there is no irritating 640k limit in conventional memory to contend with.
A Raspberry Pi easily beats anything you could build up to about Core2 territory.
Yes. Just like a modern i7 beats the pants off anything we play around with here. So what...?
Anyway, 10 years ago I would have thoroughly supported the idea of running a current Linux distro on a 386. Unfortunately the world has moved on. As of Linux kernel 3.7 (from 2012), Linux no longer supports anything older than a 486. This was mainly done because optimising SMP was almost impossible while keeping the old 386 working. Outside of the kernel, glibc (the big C library pretty much everyone and everything uses) also dropped the 386 around this time and modern versions even require i686 (Pentium Pro or later). Oh, and modern kernels, glibc and (worst of all) systemd are hugely bloated and wouldn't sensibly run on the sort of resources (particularly RAM) you have on an old beast.
That means that with Linux you'll have to run dated software too on that machine. Fortunately it's not as bad as it sounds, as older versions of the kernel are still maintained (so just as exploit-free as modern stuff, if not more so) and there are low-footprint alternatives to glibc such as uClibc. And SystemVinit still works fine. But you're deep in embedded world with this sort of setup, so don't expect 'it just works' like Ubuntu - just installing an OS would be a software project. If you manage that though, you'd have something very similar in capabilities to a modern low-end consumer router, but with more I/O and storage options, albeit with slower network hardware (ISA isn't exactly going to give you line speed 100Mbps, let alone 1Gbps).
Compared to the CPU + software side, ISA cards are a breeze. The Linux kernel basically still supports everything out there it ever did, so getting an old NE2000 NIC working should be peanuts - at least assuming it has decent jumpers and not some DOS-based tool to set parameters in EEPROM.
There's more out there than just Linux though. I particularly like NetBSD on old, limited hardware. It's very lightweight, very functional and installation is dead easy. Unfortunately it also dropped 386 long ago, so pre-486 you'll need something else, and I'm at a bit of a loss to say what.
By the way, if you do decide to do an old OS, and want something Unix-like, the obvious answer for a 386 is Xenix, Microsoft's own Unix, which in the late 1980s was by far the most common Unix variant measured by the number of machines installed.
Edit:
stamasd wrote:With only 1MB RAM, you can forget about running Linux. It won't work. 16MB should be about the bare minimum you need for that. 1MB won't even fit an ancient kernel image. Maybe you can scrape by with 8MB, but it will be slow as hell. The Rampage won't help, that will give you expanded memory but for Linux you need extended memory, and enough of it. I think the memory is your limiting factor here, not the 386, ISA etc.
1MB needs upgrading, urgently. But a 386SX can handle 16MB RAM, which would be more than enough. Even 8MB would be fine for a really minimal system, so even if that board only has two SIMM slots it's doable.
The lowest spec computer I ever ran Linux on was a 486DX50 (yes, the non-clock-doubled one) with 32MB or RAM. It was usable. I was using Slackware 3.6, my first Linux distribution, cca. 1996 or so.
When I met my partner she was running pretty much the same stuff on exactly the same hardware 😘
That was quite a few years later though, around 2003. We were poor students with ancient give-aways. On our second date I installed NetBSD on a 486 laptop while she was slashing away at some rogue-like game on her PC.
Despite what elod said above, you can get a pretty functional desktop on Linux with an ISA video card. Even a basic Trident card will do for that. Of course you will need a desktop manager withhout bells and whistles. I suggest WindowMaker https://www.windowmaker.org/ - a version is included with Slackware 3.6 if you decide to go with that.
I wouldn't recommend using a graphical environment on such a limited system. X is pretty bloated, and regardless of the VGA hardware, the CPU just doesn't have the oomph and you can't spare the RAM. I'd agree Windowmaker is the best of the really lightweight window managers, but I woudn't want to run it on less than an AM386DX-40 or i486DX/SX33.
