[NTLUG:Discuss] 486SX Distro
Chris Cox
cjcox at acm.org
Sat Jul 13 18:01:14 CDT 2002
Paul Ingendorf wrote:
> I'm looking for a distro that will support a 486SX 100 with X windows on 16mb of ram. :-) I know the constraints make this a tough system to work with which is why I thought I would post this as a question to the group as someone is bound to have actually done this and know of a distro that will do it fairly well.
>
>
I installed SuSE 6.3 on a 486SX-33 with 20M and NO CDROM (since most do not
have one and most ATAPI CDROM's won't work... an certainly not many above
4x).
I started out with Monkey Linux so I could install via floppy. I like that
distribution since it allowed me to install straight into the Win 3.1 DOS
partition that existed already. From there, I was able to configure the
ethernet device so I could do a remote install from one of my other machines
(for getting SuSE 6.3 onto the machine). The machine has a 512K Oak video
(arguably the worst video ever made!).
Well... it works! However, X is WAY too slow, primarily because of the Oak
Video card. I know that the early, early distributions, 1.1.7x, 1.2, 2.0
are the most you REALLY want to use on this. But you'll have to compile
everything, and realize that there will be many things that can't compile
or take about 2-3days to compile just to address all of the dependencies.
All-in-all, I liked Monkey Linux best, SuSE 6.3 was overkill (forget running
KDE!... that vid card could only do a few colors at 800x600 much less
1024x768). http://www.pslib.cz/monkey/docs/english.htm
You shouldn't have to worry about the lack of coprocessor.
I have several of the older distributions...I'm sure they are still
online somewhere as well.
You may want to take a look at:
http://www.ibiblio.org/vectorlinux/index.htm
(looks like a fairly updated distrib for lightweight systems)
Also you can peruse:
http://www.realtime-info.be/encyc/rtlinux/EmbeddedLinux/TinyLinux.htm
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