I am a long time user of FreeBSD (since version 4) - you're unlikely to find what you want on FreeBSD side. The basic system is not powerful enough to run a FreeBSD version that supports that PCMCIA network card, with a X GUI.

40MB is about the resident size of basic FreeBSD 4.4 install (sendmail and other stuff turned off), with X in 640x480 and Windowmaker (a low footprint but full window manager).

With that amounts of RAM you would look at FreeBSD 2.x or a corresponding NetBSD version from circa 1995 (its early on in libre BSD life so these two share a lot of common code). Note these early versions might have no ports or just a handful of them, so what you would be working with is a POSIX X11 workstation with 5-15 MB of RAM available depending on how less RAM hungry those first versions are compared to circa Y2K 4.4R.

Btw if by DOS access you mean accessing floppy and HDD via BIOS, early FreeBSD will just do that.

the comment about dos access to floppy & pcmcia storage was to highlight the available routes for install media.

Are you sure that CardBus cards are even supposed to work in pre-CardBus PCMCIA slots? I don't think so

it's a 5v 16bit pcmcia card. i just had it working under win2k drivers in a cardbus slot.

stanwebber wrote on 2025-08-25, 22:35:

given these considerations, would someone please recommend an older flavor of bsd for a vlb, isa (no pci bus) pentium 75mhz laptop with 40mb of ram and no cdrom, but has dos access to floppy & pcmcia storage. i would ideally like something with a graphical desktop and a kernel new enough to support a bcm 4306 wireless card if possible, given my system's limited hardware specs.

I was responding mostly to the above. Install media is irrelevant, if you use CFs you're able to make the install on a modern PC via emulator.

If your goal is Unix-like system that supports your wireless card and performs OK on that computer, BSD is not it. If Linux is not it, then I guess you're out of luck.

I'm pretty sure, but we can double check that, the driver for your card became available in FreeBSD 7 age. This was contemporary version when I got my brand new Q6600. You don't want to run it on a 40 MB 75 MHz P5.
The driver - for sure - was not around when versions fit for your computer were new. These are only first FreeBSD and NetBSD releases. They have XFree86 - they do not have ports and packages.

To not go to long lengths here, early BSDs are not fit for x86 desktop. They fit for x86 server running standard Unix services or older proprietary Unix stuff.

I've long thought what to use on my Pentium 100 with 48 MB RAM and the best solution I found is loadlin into Slackware 9.

As I'm also into systems of this era, it's worth noting that that Slackware 7.1 was the last one to come bundled with XFree86 3.3.6, which is relevant if you're using one of the many cards that didn't make the cut for 4.0 (including most things ISA or VLB but also some early PCI)

jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-08-29, 23:57:

As I'm also into systems of this era, it's worth noting that that Slackware 7.1 was the last one to come bundled with XFree86 3.3.6, which is relevant if you're using one of the many cards that didn't make the cut for 4.0 (including most things ISA or VLB but also some early PCI)

These same Xservers are included in pasture/ all the way through Slackware 10.2. I do kind of wonder how useful they are at giving proper hw support that was lost in 4.x.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2025-08-30, 02:01:

jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-08-29, 23:57:

As I'm also into systems of this era, it's worth noting that that Slackware 7.1 was the last one to come bundled with XFree86 3.3.6, which is relevant if you're using one of the many cards that didn't make the cut for 4.0 (including most things ISA or VLB but also some early PCI)

These same Xservers are included in pasture/ all the way through Slackware 10.2. I do kind of wonder how useful they are at giving proper hw support that was lost in 4.x.

Yes, but xf86config is missing from /pasture (they must have thought you'd be carrying your XF86Config file forward from 7.1)

jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-08-30, 02:24:

Yes, but xf86config is missing from /pasture (they must have thought you'd be carrying your XF86Config file forward from 7.1)

The README says, install the packages from /pasture on top of XF86 4.x. That would mean you should still have the examples and xf86config command. But if that is somehow not compatible, then the README further goes on to say, you still have the xset package that you can use to create a config using XF86Setup.

thanks for the info on the bsd kernel modules for the bcm4306. it's a shame i can't get it working under any os for this laptop. it's an oddball 802.11g pcmcia card (non-cardbus)... perhaps the only one in existence. i tried asking for device id support to be added on the b43legacy developers mailing list, but it seems to be long abandoned.

If you need a quick intervention on the FreeBSD source like adding IDs to a driver I would be able to do that.

zb10948 wrote on 2025-08-29, 23:21:

[...]
I've long thought what to use on my Pentium 100 with 48 MB RAM and the best solution I found is loadlin into Slackware 9.

USL (AT&T) UNIX SVR4 runs great on my Pentium 166MHz processor with 40 MB of RAM. It supports IDE or an Adaptec AHA-154xx SCSI HBA. I use FreeBSD 14.3 SCSI target emulation to present a SCSI LUN to it. That allows me to take ZFS snapshots of the LUN from FreeBSD.

I highly recommend not cheaping out on RAM expansion when it comes to any Unix system.
Normally, expansion of up to 64MB can be done without exceeding cacheable area.

Reasonably speaking, 96 or 128MB would make sense for an 90s Linux/Unix.
So it doesn't have to access the swap partition or file so often.
Because this might unecessarily cause bus access for i/o.

An SCSI based controller/HDD/CD-ROM drive is being recommended, too.
Old IDE of the 486 or Pentium 1 era isn’t that great.
Though on a CD-ROM drive, it's not so important maybe, as long as it is being detected. ATAPI CD-ROM support was sort of okay by late 90s.

With that much RAM and a fast CPU, NetBSD 10.1 (the latest release) should run without any problems.
NetBSD runs without any issues, including up to X11, on my home Am486DX4-100/32MB (+Permedia2) machine and on my MMX166/64MB (+Trio64) machine.
I also don't think there will be any issues with booting. Once I managed to achieve PXE booting, I was able to complete the installation on a 486 without any issues (tested on i82559 and 3C509B). Even without PCI, it should be possible on an NE2000 (I believe the PXE ROM for the NE2000 included with the old qemu was less than 64KB).
I think the problem is storage. A full install, including X11, will consume nearly 1GB of space...

Starcat wrote on 2025-11-12, 23:05:

zb10948 wrote on 2025-08-29, 23:21:

[...]
I've long thought what to use on my Pentium 100 with 48 MB RAM and the best solution I found is loadlin into Slackware 9.

USL (AT&T) UNIX SVR4 runs great on my Pentium 166MHz processor with 40 MB of RAM. It supports IDE or an Adaptec AHA-154xx SCSI HBA. I use FreeBSD 14.3 SCSI target emulation to present a SCSI LUN to it. That allows me to take ZFS snapshots of the LUN from FreeBSD.

Nice. I've used iSCSI export to Windows 7 from my first ZFS storage on FreeBSD 8, years ago. I have switched over the entire drive array 2 times since, but the ZFS pool still lives as my main archive in FreeBSD 14.3.

I guess my reason to run Slackware over ancient FreeBSD, NetBSD or any commercial Unix is more application and hardware support. It does support DOS ISA soundcards and such, has a lot of prebuilt packages, etc...

I have original distribution box of SCO OpenDesktop but the version that was contemporary for 486. Resource wise it fits the Pentium, however I find the FOSS builds/ports are rather scarce and fit on one CD. I've tried a newer version on my Pentium MMX and it does feel like a very very user friendly Unix GUI workstation, things are either configured through elaborate Motif UIs or in worst case a TUI in console. Bonus is built in DOS and Windows emulation. But again the MMX with 256mb RAM can technically run a mid to late 00s Linux or BSD no issues, and there should be thousands of packages in archive...

kagura1050 wrote on 2025-11-14, 06:37:

With that much RAM and a fast CPU, NetBSD 10.1 (the latest release) should run without any problems. NetBSD runs without any iss […]
Show full quote

With that much RAM and a fast CPU, NetBSD 10.1 (the latest release) should run without any problems.
NetBSD runs without any issues, including up to X11, on my home Am486DX4-100/32MB (+Permedia2) machine and on my MMX166/64MB (+Trio64) machine.
I also don't think there will be any issues with booting. Once I managed to achieve PXE booting, I was able to complete the installation on a 486 without any issues (tested on i82559 and 3C509B). Even without PCI, it should be possible on an NE2000 (I believe the PXE ROM for the NE2000 included with the old qemu was less than 64KB).
I think the problem is storage. A full install, including X11, will consume nearly 1GB of space...

This is very interesting, I haven't been exposed to NetBSD a lot but I guess due to ultraportable nature of the system the kernel is completely modular.

Basically I may have done a mistake in steps with FreeBSD. There were a lot of efforts to split the kernel into modules since those early versions. Perhaps a carefully built newer version of the system would have less residency than standard 4.x series...

In any case I'm quite curious about NetBSD. What kind of memory usage is the idle base install at?

I remembered after replying to this, but my 486/32MB machine was using a custom kernel (with nouveau/radeon/amdgpu and various other new hardware disabled) (11MB; the stock kernel was 22MB).
When I used that kernel with qemu (32MB configuration) and launched the userland from http://www.ceres.dti.ne.jp/tsutsui/netbsd/liveimage/, the memory usage was 85% (roughly 27MB), so I think 48MB would be the minimum configuration for the stock kernel (memory usage is 27+11=38MB?).

If you're building the kernel (the instructions are in the official documentation; I was able to build it using gcc-10 in a Linux environment), I recommend using the GENERIC_TINY config on machines without PCI. The kernel can be made as small as 3MB.