You can find distros here
Something very lightweight is KolibriOS, but I've never tried it.

Roman555 wrote:

You can find distros here
Something very lightweight is KolibriOS, but I've never tried it.

I think the i386 option include also something more modern as Lubuntu that I think it doesn't support the 486. Maybe I can try i486.

Gentoo, for all its optimizations, doesn't really result in that lean of a system. There are so many... "optional"... packages that are essentially required if you want to do anything at all, that it just ends up being a full-blown Linux install anyway. I've been using it as my primary (pretty much only) distro for over a decade and it used to be capable of building very minimal installs. I guess maintaining that complex of a build tree just fell out of favor over time.

My personal opinion on this quest is that it's going to force you to either move toward more modern hardware, or less modern interaction with the world. The biggest problem I think you'll have is the web. We've not using HTML 4 and CSS 2 anymore. Modern web browsers suck up more memory per tab than your most well endowed candidate PC will have in RAM. And more than your target PC will have in disk space. Period-correct browsers that can cope with less than 20GB of RAM won't be able to render modern pages. "Just browsing the web" used to be a minimal burden on a computer, but it's now one of the most complex tasks it will be asked to endure. If you can live without HTTP, you're probably fine to use a ZX Spectrum.

I used my Compaq 4/75cx (75 MHz 486DX) as my secondary laptop throughout high school (2014-2018) for pretty much everything except intense internet stuff. I would write reports on word 97, email on outlook 2000, powerpoint presentations on powerpoint 97, even did some image editing for a project I had to do. Basically the only thing that I couldn't do on it was anything involving video, or a lot of modern webpages. I even had 2 different drives, as they came in handy little caddies, one with win95, and another with dos 6.22/win3.11.

But then again, I'm rather insane, so there's that.

SirNickity wrote:

Gentoo, for all its optimizations, doesn't really result in that lean of a system. There are so many... "optional"... packages that are essentially required if you want to do anything at all, that it just ends up being a full-blown Linux install anyway. I've been using it as my primary (pretty much only) distro for over a decade and it used to be capable of building very minimal installs. I guess maintaining that complex of a build tree just fell out of favor over time.

My personal opinion on this quest is that it's going to force you to either move toward more modern hardware, or less modern interaction with the world. The biggest problem I think you'll have is the web. We've not using HTML 4 and CSS 2 anymore. Modern web browsers suck up more memory per tab than your most well endowed candidate PC will have in RAM. And more than your target PC will have in disk space. Period-correct browsers that can cope with less than 20GB of RAM won't be able to render modern pages. "Just browsing the web" used to be a minimal burden on a computer, but it's now one of the most complex tasks it will be asked to endure. If you can live without HTTP, you're probably fine to use a ZX Spectrum.

Thanks. The problem with other distro is that they doesn't suppport i486 or its kernel are too much old and at that point I would use a faster Win95/98SE to benefit from specific components drivers.
From the P2-400 I tried lately even if anything was slow but not as much as I was expecting, for browsers I tried some very basic textual with not-javascript like dillo and the epiphany gnome browser that still sometime crash and somtimes is too slow but the Pentium2 feels like the lowest I could use it with. At the end similar to the Raspberry PI 1 ARM11 experience with Debian.

Have you seen this?

http://yeokhengmeng.com/2018/01/make-the-486-great-again/

Saying the ancient PC is slow is a huge understatement. It takes 11 minutes to boot up to the login prompt and 5.5 mins to shutdown.

diopside wrote:

Have you seen this?

http://yeokhengmeng.com/2018/01/make-the-486-great-again/

Saying the ancient PC is slow is a huge understatement. It takes 11 minutes to boot up to the login prompt and 5.5 mins to shutdown.

Yes, that's why I came back to this idea I always liked to try ( about the booting time it's a 133Mhz one 😵 ). 😁

I did something similar to what you are describing 10 years ago with a Cyrix 5x86-120 and 256 MB of RAM. I tried out about a dozen light distros and seem to recall that DSL, Damn Small Linux, was the least slow and most cooperative. That was 10 years ago though. You are probably asking for too much in 2019. Even in 1999, using a 486 was considered torture.

What might be more realistic is some kind of proxy forwarding service for web pages, such that the pages display properly on older browsers. But I suppose you could use something like Remote Desktop for that.

Can you recompile modern Linux kernals for i486?

SirNickity wrote:

Gentoo, for all its optimizations, doesn't really result in that lean of a system. There are so many... "optional"... packages that are essentially required if you want to do anything at all, that it just ends up being a full-blown Linux install anyway. I've been using it as my primary (pretty much only) distro for over a decade and it used to be capable of building very minimal installs. I guess maintaining that complex of a build tree just fell out of favor over time.

Indeed. Gentoo was my go-to distro in the early 00's, but after 2005 the quality control started slipping too much. I tired of pretty much every update breaking the system, sometimes quite badly, forcing me to spend unwanted evenings getting it all running again. That said, I disagree with the statement that it bloats too much. If too much optional crap gets installed, your USE-flags aren't specific enough. I was able to make an install significantly smaller, both in memory footprint and disk size, than DSL, to fit on a P266MMX laptop with 32MB of RAM. It ran surprisingly well, at least so long as you didn't actually start up any applications in the Windowmaker desktop 😉

In terms of Linux only LFS would be significantly lighter than Gentoo. Make sure you don't even go near systemd though, that resource hog is a no-no on light hardware (and tbh I don't like it on high-end stuff either, but that's another discussion).

However I'd propose an alternative to Linux that is potentially lighter, nonetheless fully up-to-date, well supported and vastly easier to get running than Gentoo or LFS: NetBSD. NetBSD will run on a 486 and has a pretty idiot-proof text-based installler. There's less software available for NetBSD than for Linux, and there's less driver support, but for a 486 that's a totally moot point: it will work and anything you can't get that would be available on Linux won't run decently on the old system anyway.

My personal opinion on this quest is that it's going to force you to either move toward more modern hardware, or less modern interaction with the world. The biggest problem I think you'll have is the web. We've not using HTML 4 and CSS 2 anymore. Modern web browsers suck up more memory per tab than your most well endowed candidate PC will have in RAM. And more than your target PC will have in disk space. Period-correct browsers that can cope with less than 20GB of RAM won't be able to render modern pages. "Just browsing the web" used to be a minimal burden on a computer, but it's now one of the most complex tasks it will be asked to endure. If you can live without HTTP, you're probably fine to use a ZX Spectrum.

Forget a graphical browser - but you can get a surprising level of functionality out of text-based browsers like lynx/links2. Vogons works excellently in any event 😉

feipoa wrote:

I did something similar to what you are describing 10 years ago with a Cyrix 5x86-120 and 25 6 MB of RAM. I tried out about a dozen light distros and seem to recall that DSL, Damn Small Linux, was the least slow and most cooperative. That was 10 years ago though. You are probably asking for too much in 2019. Even in 1999, using a 486 was considered torture.

What might be more realistic is some kind of proxy forwarding service for web pages, such that the pages display properly on older browsers. But I suppose you could use something like Remote Desktop for that.

Can you recompile modern Linux kernals for i486?

256Mb of ram? wow 😎

I was considering also some Freebsd os that I never tried but seems to still support i486 cpus. I am reading some tutorial to compile Gentoo distro on the 486 but not really easy even if not impossible.
I was thinking about using a Matrox Millennium or a Riva128 PCI as vga, a Sound Blaster CT4810 as sound card, a via pci usb controller. By the way a scripted or graphical interface for gentoo installation or compiling would not have been bad.. 😵
I know this config will never be able to do anything... maybe I'm asking too much and I should go for a Win95/98 installation but I still would have the problem of the not supporting USB controllers, if I remember correctly before Win98SE/ME that are probably too much again for this config.

386SX wrote:

feipoa wrote:

I did something similar to what you are describing 10 years ago with a Cyrix 5x86-120 and 25 6 MB of RAM. I tried out about a dozen light distros and seem to recall that DSL, Damn Small Linux, was the least slow and most cooperative. That was 10 years ago though. You are probably asking for too much in 2019. Even in 1999, using a 486 was considered torture.

What might be more realistic is some kind of proxy forwarding service for web pages, such that the pages display properly on older browsers. But I suppose you could use something like Remote Desktop for that.

Can you recompile modern Linux kernals for i486?

I was considering also some Freebsd os that I never tried but seems to still support i486 cpus. I am reading some tutorial to compile Gentoo distro on the 486 but not really easy even if not impossible.

FreeBSD is much heavier than NetBSD, which is probably your best option.

I was thinking about using a Matrox Millennium or a Riva128 PCI as vga, a Sound Blaster CT4810 as sound card, a via pci usb controller.

Should work, at least assuming the Via USB card can work with the old PCI 1.x bus on the 486.

By the way a scripted or graphical interface for gentoo installation or compiling would not have been bad.. 😵

Not really. The challenge with Gentoo isn't following the (excellent, detailed) handbook to go step-by-step towards a working system, the real challenge is figuring out the correct USE flags for your purpose. If the regular installation is too complicated for you, you're definitely not going to do well on that lot.

That said, Sabayon is Gentoo with everything done graphically. Looks flashy, but you sort of lose the main reason to want to choose Gentoo in the first place - by default it's completely unoptimized, so you might as well take the easier, better supported route of Ubuntu instead.

I know this config will never be able to do anything... maybe I'm asking too much and I should go for a Win95/98 installation but I still would have the problem of the not supporting USB controllers, if I remember correctly before Win98SE/ME that are probably too much again for this config.

Win9x is a totally different use case - easy, graphical, but no something you'd want to put on internet. Also 98 would be slooow on a DX4-100. With NetBSD you have a light minimal system that's at least as secure as a fully updated modern box, if not more so. You can do music, you can chat, you can do text-based browsing. You can do pretty much any networking you could do on a recent machine. Word processing and minimal spreadsheet stuff will also be fine. I could probably do about 75% of my day-job work on it (Powerpoint and MS Outlook would be an issue)

dionb wrote:

FreeBSD is much heavier than NetBSD, which is probably your best option. […]
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386SX wrote:

feipoa wrote:

I did something similar to what you are describing 10 years ago with a Cyrix 5x86-120 and 25 6 MB of RAM. I tried out about a dozen light distros and seem to recall that DSL, Damn Small Linux, was the least slow and most cooperative. That was 10 years ago though. You are probably asking for too much in 2019. Even in 1999, using a 486 was considered torture.

What might be more realistic is some kind of proxy forwarding service for web pages, such that the pages display properly on older browsers. But I suppose you could use something like Remote Desktop for that.

Can you recompile modern Linux kernals for i486?

I was considering also some Freebsd os that I never tried but seems to still support i486 cpus. I am reading some tutorial to compile Gentoo distro on the 486 but not really easy even if not impossible.

FreeBSD is much heavier than NetBSD, which is probably your best option.

I was thinking about using a Matrox Millennium or a Riva128 PCI as vga, a Sound Blaster CT4810 as sound card, a via pci usb controller.

Should work, at least assuming the Via USB card can work with the old PCI 1.x bus on the 486.

By the way a scripted or graphical interface for gentoo installation or compiling would not have been bad.. 😵

Not really. The challenge with Gentoo isn't following the (excellent, detailed) handbook to go step-by-step towards a working system, the real challenge is figuring out the correct USE flags for your purpose. If the regular installation is too complicated for you, you're definitely not going to do well on that lot.

That said, Sabayon is Gentoo with everything done graphically. Looks flashy, but you sort of lose the main reason to want to choose Gentoo in the first place - by default it's completely unoptimized, so you might as well take the easier, better supported route of Ubuntu instead.

I know this config will never be able to do anything... maybe I'm asking too much and I should go for a Win95/98 installation but I still would have the problem of the not supporting USB controllers, if I remember correctly before Win98SE/ME that are probably too much again for this config.

Win9x is a totally different use case - easy, graphical, but no something you'd want to put on internet. Also 98 would be slooow on a DX4-100. With NetBSD you have a light minimal system that's at least as secure as a fully updated modern box, if not more so. You can do music, you can chat, you can do text-based browsing. You can do pretty much any networking you could do on a recent machine. Word processing and minimal spreadsheet stuff will also be fine. I could probably do about 75% of my day-job work on it (Powerpoint and MS Outlook would be an issue)

Thank you. 😀 In fact that was the point using Gentoo to optimize it as much as possible but I am more a ubuntu/debian basic user; but now I am reading some Netbsd tutorial and info to better understand cause I never tried it. I should look for a floppy installation cause I've problem with plop manager tool not reading the cd drive (set as seconday on the hard disk ide).

dionb wrote:

If too much optional crap gets installed, your USE-flags aren't specific enough.

My problem has always been getting anything to build that requires X without having to install three compilers, two interpreted languages, a Java VM, three database engines, fifteen libraries for managing audio streaming, etc etc etc... At some point, it felt like Gentoo package maintainers just stopped trying to make it possible to strip off technically optional dependencies with USE flags anymore. If you want X, obviously you're going to want an assortment of Korean emojis! I mean, duh! 😵

You can separate runtime dependencies and build-time dependencies, and it might even still compile. But god help you try to build Grub without four different versions of Python in your target root.

feipoa wrote:

Can you recompile modern Linux kernals for i486?

Technically, yes. I think so. They dropped 386 support a few years ago, though.

However, I would expect there to be some trouble building a recent kernel without a recent compiler, which may have its own dependencies. AFAIK, you can still target older CPUs in a cross-compiler, but you will almost definitely run into trouble compiling a 3.x kernel ON a 486. (Not that you would want to.)

On a related note, I tried recently to boot a Pentium with 64MB RAM with a variety of live CD distros. It did not go well. I finally grabbed an archived copy of Red Hat 5 (?), and I got that boot floppy to load OK. But it did not have the utilities I needed, so I gave up and ran an ancient DSL on a Pentium II instead.

dkarguth wrote:

I used my Compaq 4/75cx (75 MHz 486DX) as my secondary laptop throughout high school (2014-2018) for pretty much everything except intense internet stuff. I would write reports on word 97, email on outlook 2000, powerpoint presentations on powerpoint 97, even did some image editing for a project I had to do. Basically the only thing that I couldn't do on it was anything involving video, or a lot of modern webpages. I even had 2 different drives, as they came in handy little caddies, one with win95, and another with dos 6.22/win3.11.

But then again, I'm rather insane, so there's that.

I got through the entirety of grade 9, 10, and the first semester of grade 11 using a ThinkPad 600E running windows 2000. My main desktop, and what I'm writing this very post on, has an 866 MHz Pentium 3.

good luck browsing on anything single core

Regarding gentoo, also consider using a modern/fast system to cross-compile for your 486 target, which will let you deploy and test quickly, and then make any tweaks without waiting days for the rebuild.

Another reason to cross-compile gentoo:, portage (atleast when I quit using gentoo) had become excruciatingly slow, even on modern systems. I'm not sure if they've re-architected it to match the speeds of say 'apt' and 'dpkg', but if not.. it could take a month or more to return results on a 486. I remember portage spinning away for tens of minutes, after which the build would burn through in seconds.

Good project!

You can try OpenBSD even in their last release, 6.4.

OpenBSD is the root of BSD UNIX like (FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc) and in my opinion is more UNIX than Linux.

In any case you must try a Window Manager rather than Desktop Manager. Please, visit www.xwinman.org to more info.

Good luck!

OpenBSD is developed from NetBSD which had a start contemporary with FreeBSD, right around the time of USL vs UCB being settled. Theo de Raat was one of the founding devs of NetBSD.

gdjacobs wrote:

OpenBSD is developed from NetBSD which had a start contemporary with FreeBSD, right around the time of USL vs UCB being settled. Theo de Raat was one of the founding devs of NetBSD.

I was wrong, thank you very much for the information. 😅