How about marking this thread as "solved"?

I don't think it is solved.

I'll mark it solved what Pat V says that he's not considering it anymore. Or Alien Bob communicates this from him.

EDIT:
Oh, wait, this isn't even my thread, LOL. The other one is mine.

As I promised, I got to try an install on my old pentium. I failed, but the reason is interesting.

We have all forgotten the bios hard disk limitations of the time. My old 486 had a 487 meg hard disk, as there was a 512mb limit. That applied to all 486 boxes. A compiled kernel is over 600MB! That was followed by the massive advance to 2 Gigabytes using LBA, which was more space than anyone could use, ever . In fact, I have a 2.5 Gig disk which works in the pentium, but my current install looks nearer 5 gigs.

Now my old box sat down with hard disk trouble, because the disk in it is iffy, and it just didn't want to know about the other disks I have lying about. It has one of those bios that never lets you in to adjust things. I gave up quickly.

So Slackware 13.1 can't run in a 486.

Unpacked, the kernel source is less than 400MB. My Huge kernels are just above 5MB. And I put a 850MB drive in my 386 if my memory serves me right. That disk was later put in a 486 that I still have for certain CAD under DOS.

Yeah, well it's clear that on a real i486, it is impossible to install the latest slackware. If Pat V wants to move it up to i586, then he can without any worries ... if he wants to, of course.

This thread should not be about compiling a kernel on a 486 box... that would be insanity. Use a fast modern computer to compile your software.
The Slackware 13.1 kernel is a few megabytes, and the total of all kernel modules is a little over 100 MB. Compile a custom kernel for that old 486 and you can get a away with a few megabytes total.

An old computer like a 486 should not be used as a desktop computer and run a GUI. A typical use would be as a server in your network (file- print mail- or streaming audio server for instance). A full installation of Slackware would not be required.

That is not the correct conclusion to draw from business_kid's post.

And you still have not proven that there is a real performance gain to be made from a recompilation for a i686 target.

Eric

That limit affects the size of the boot disk. You could have a second disk to accommodate the operating system.
From http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/html_singl...k-HOWTO/#ss5.1

Well, in fact the real problem is the 2.1G limit on BIOSes before April 1996, because the system hang if you use a hardisk capacity beyond this value...

Why can't slack13.1 run on a 486?

If you can take the time to, let's say, recompile the kernel without stuff like USB, wireless, OCFS, and lots of other things...

On installation time you could pick carefully what you want to get (no KDE, for example). Or perhaps you could get a swag of old 1GB disks and set up a RAID-0 array or a LVM VG so you can get all the programs installed and later choose what to uninstall - I did it once with a 486-DX2 and two 800MB HDDs, with slack12 if memory serves me correct

EDIT: 800 * 2 = 1600 MB, right? I had to start without X, actually. But I got a minimal X system working later

I do not consider that a valid argument against.

You can stuff a very functional server machine and even a trimmed-down desktop in 2 GB of hard disk. Look for the various threads on "small slackware" on this forum.

Eric

The questions is not if a modify version of Slackware runs in a 486, but if the actual version unchange version runs.
If you said that modify this and that to run in a 486, so you have no problem recompile to i486.
The question is, how many of you think installing the actual Slackware in a 486 without change a thing?
Because the vote in this poll i486 are a minority and then aren't running Slackware 13.1.

I known that the performance may not be so significant, but should have enough impact to the other distro change.

I state that an unmodified Slackware 13.1 installs and runs on a 486 computer. It will not be a full installation if you need to keep the installed footprint below 2 GB.

I guess this will be my last contribution to this thread...you are entitled to yur opinion that Slackware should abandon the i486 target. I still do not see the advantage of a full recompilation of the distro for a different target, to get improvements that nobody is able to corroborate with evidence.

Eric

While I agree that it is probably useless to recompile slackware, I still don't think it will run on an i486.

This is just my opinion. The decision is from Pat.