Sounds like a great build! Post some pictures!

Bobbi wrote on 2024-12-19, 20:04:

Curious if anyone else here is into running old Linux distros on old hardware, or am I the only such weirdo?

I used to run Slackware 3.4 and later Redhat 5.0 on a Pentium back in 1998. I never ran Linux on 486 and earlier IIRC, I was an OS/2 Warp guy during that time. Around 1998 was when I had to leave Warp behind and start experimenting. I eventually settled for a Windows 98/RedHat Linux 5.x dual boot for a very long time. I stuck to RedHat through 6.2. I was not happy with the KDE to Gnome transition, and started using Windowmaker at some point. I moved on to Windows 2000 as soon as it came out and did not really use Linux until around Vista release, around which I started dual-booting XP and Ubuntu. I've since had a form of Ubuntu (most recently Mint) as my secondary OS.

I still use AntiX on my testbench and on some of my retro pcs. I find very little appeal in instaling a 2.x kernel distribution on older hardware though, particularly considering how poor an experience the installation usually is. Granted, RedHat was a breath of fresh air after Slackware at the time, but it still sucks ass.

I started using linux with very late socket 7 pentiums and pentium ii machines in 2000. Just a little later I switch to slackware and I have used it ever since. I think it was in 2002, I got a 486 laptop for free and put slackware linux on that too to do some programming, and used it for a few years, and kept it updated up to slackware 12.0.

I've more recently looked at older slackware before slackware 8, and find slackware pretty much unchanged all these years, besides the evolutionary changes that had to happen. On the surface, it's pretty much the same. I've tried the earliest on a 486, and it deserves some respect for what it was capable of doing there even in '93.

I don't have alot of time for experimenting, but I would like to find out which version of slackware works the best for a 486, and what can I install on top of it to make it productive and fun.

This was the Most Popular computer specs in 1993

486dx-33
ISA motherboard
4mb RAM
Svga video card
Sound blaster 16 compatible sound card
2x CDROM ( Panasonic or Sony )
120mb IDE hard drive
Svga monitor
14.4 kb dial up modem
3.5 and 5.25 Floppy drives
Windows 3x and DOS 5.0

This was the Specs of my first computer back in 1993
It was also the Specs of home computers being sold by IBM . AST, Gateway, Dell, Packard Bell, etc.
They were Marketing these computers. As “Multimedia computers”
And selling them with Multimedia CD’s
This is when the CD and Sound card became popular.

These computers sold from about $2500 back in 1993
I had my own computer built with these Specs because it was less expensive to build your own computer
And you could customize it how ever you wanted with sound cards and video card, Memory, Ports, Modems, etc.
And have it built with Non-Proprietary parts so you could always upgrade it.
But the IBM PS/1 was the Computer to have in 1993

I will upload a pic once I clean my desk a bit. It is too shameful right now!

I started with Linux back in 1993 I think, with SLS 1.02. I managed to get my hands on just about the bare minimum hardware required to run it - an Amstrad 2386 (386DX-20 with 2MB). Even for the ancient SLS distro, with kernel 0.99pl-something, it was a labour of hercules to install it with so little memory. However I was desperate for Linux, having run Minix 1.5 on a 286 for several years at that point.

I struggled with the Amstrad for a year or so (and actually did my undergrad CompSci final project on that machine!) Then I got a summer job and a 486-66 with 32MB of RAM and an S3 VLB graphics card. I upgraded to Slackware 2.0.0 and I was in heaven. That was my system for my postgrad years. During that time I basically rolled my own Linux distro, downloading and compiling stuff from Usenet. It was a huge labour of love, but I learned a lot. I remember the libc migration and the a.out -> ELF migration being a huge pain in the ass.

After a hiatus where I moved halfway across the world, my next Linux box was Redhat 7 on a Celeron 466. I ran a few Redhat versions before jumping to Debian and then to Ubuntu when it came out. Have been on Ubuntu ever since.

I did quite a bit of experimentation in Qemu to see what Slackware versions to try. I like Slackware for the 486 cos the startup scripts etc are fairly lightweight in terms of lines of Bash to interpret. I settled on 3.3 as my low-end and 8.1 as my high-end config. 3.3 is reasonably comfortable with 8MB of RAM, and Netscape 3 runs reasonably well on it. 8.1 is a fair bit heavier. It will boot with 8MB but X is miserable with so little RAM. With 32MB it is usable with X, and Mozilla 1.0 works quite nicely with the WRP proxy to browse the modern web, provided you are patient 😀

Slackware 8.1 has a lot of useful stuff that is not present in 3.3 such as netcat, nmap, ssh/scp, rsync, ... to name a few. I had to enable some older (weaker) ciphers on a couple of machines on my LAN to allow an old SSH client to connect, but otherwise it is pretty seamless. I can even print to my Laserjet MFP.

I may explore some slightly newer Slackwares. I think in theory 486 support was dropped around Slackware 12 timeframe. However even with 8.1 I have to use an older XFree86 from the "pasture" subdirectory, because XOrg dropped support for the older Cirrus Logic stuff. So I suspect there is a limit how much newer I can go, and it's only going to get bigger and slower ...

The system I built back in 1993 was as follows:
- Huge tower case
- Asus mainboard, VLB. Pretty sure it was Sis chipset.
- 486DX2-66
- 32MB of DRAM
- S3 VLB video card, don't recall the exact chipset
- Multi-IO
- I already had an IDE drive ~250MB
- 1.44MB floppy of course

It was probably at least $2000.

You probably paid about $2000 just for the memory in 1993.

That is an interesting choice that you made to put so much memory in your computer at that time running SLS. I'm pretty sure the early kernels had RAM limitations when I was reading about compiling the kernel. Now the 486 that I recently installed Slackware 1.01 on does support the full 64MB I have in the system (max according to that kernel), and it runs like heaven for any program made for it. Compiling a kernel with that much memory was a breeze. So if you were able to suffer through that install and get a decent kernel that worked fine in those days, maybe you had one of the best linux computers anyone could have asked for??

You'll have to let me know what kinds of things you can do on these 486 linux machines, given that is what you used.

Well mostly I used the system for C++ development (X Windows apps doing number crunching and visualization for my PhD work.) I did all my docs in LaTeX (including letters etc.) and I used the venerable sc for spreadsheets. Also elm for email, the emacs gnus module for Usernet and later on Netscape for web. It was basically like a Sun workstation on the cheap 😀

Bobbi wrote on 2024-12-19, 20:04:

Curious if anyone else here is into running old Linux distros on old hardware, or am I the only such weirdo?

Hi Bobbi,

I recently got a 486DX-33 too (which is more or less the same model as my very first computer only it being a 486 SX-25 eventually running Slackware in '93) and my initial plan was to PXE boot (with NFS root) it for initial inspection.
This didn't work out as I could not make the NE2000 clone network card to boot the system.
The machine has no CD drive so I settled for trying various pre-prepared old Debian versions.
Creating virtual machines in proxmox and putting images of the virtual hard drive on SD card I was able to run Slink (Kernel 2.0.x), Woody (Kernel 2.2.x) and Sarge (Kernel 2.4.x) without too much trouble.
Besides a non-working network card, that is.

A 3Com card would work with Woody and Sarge but for the latter I had to create a stripped down kernel without i.e. RAM disk support.
8 MB appears to be barely enough to boot and run a shell on Sarge, anything on top of that will slow down the system terribly. Thus I'll try more RAM as soon as it arrives 😉

Cheers,
Flo

I am just building a 2.4.37 kernel (last of the 2.4.x) for Slackware 8.1. Hoping that I will be able to get the Aztech driver going under that version, since there seem to have been some commits to support my card in 2.4.x (for x > 18).

I am doing the build under Qemu though, cos I don't have all week!

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2024-12-21, 00:11:

You probably paid about $2000 just for the memory in 1993.

This. I paid $2000 for a DX-33 with 4MB memory in 1993.

I finally cleaned up (half of) my desk.

Are you gonna play doom on that?

I have both DOS and Linux Doom installed 😀