I think the DX4 was offered as 3x25=75MHz, 3x33.3=100Mhz and perhaps others.

Yes, if you have "better" clunkers in your arsenal, there's no sense spending money.

There's also no sense in running modern Slackware on a 486 but I find it interesting that we still can.....at least for now.

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I have to ask...you seriously have wireless working on a 486? I have Pentium 233 laptop that was going to collect dust because everything I read suggested you needed at least 300mhz to do 802.11.

I am very excited to hear this. Could you provide details? ie: kernel, wireless adapter, security (WPA, WEP or none), etc.

Thanks.

There is no computer involved, he does it in his head :-)

Andrew

Update: It "only" took 18 hours for the 486 to compile its own stripped-down 2.6.24.4 kernel.
Results:

vmlinuz = 1.3M
modules tree = 8.5M
Both mpg123 and ogg123 now play my 160 kbps tunes collection flawlessly!

That poor old CPU sure got a rude awakening.

Slackware Rocks!

I hope you didn't forget anything!!

Imagine how many days it must take to compile KDE on such a rig! If it makes you wonder why PatV would do that, it's because many programs don't respect the CFLAGS you set and so the only way to be sure to get i486 compatibility is to really compile on a 486. I'd make a casual guess that around two weeks -night and day- would be needed to compile all of QT/KDE...

@crashbox, if the card is 16 bit and the kernel recognizes your pcmcia controller and the card I don't see a reason to have problems.

Let's run some numbers.

Based upon Galaxy66's experience, we can see that it takes 18 hours to compile a 2.6 series kernel (with modules) on a '486.

On my 3.5 year old single core P4 (with HT), the same exercise takes approximately 3 minutes. On this very same P4, it takes ~ 1 hour to compile the kdebase package alone. At a guess, it would take approximately 8 to 12 hours to compile the complete set of KDE packages on this machine.

So, if we were to extrapolate, based upon the kernel results mentioned above, the results might show that it could take somewhere between 120 and 180 days to compile the complete set of KDE packages on a '486.

Bearing this in mind, I think it is fairly safe to say that Pat doesn't really compile KDE on a '486, and that any comments he may or may not have made about doing this very thing may (or may not ) have been made in a joking manner. Sorry to disappoint...

The CFLAGS thing is a nice story though.

Well, maybe it was all just in fun, but the CFLAGS thing is no 'story'. Some sources do not respect settings passed in a normal fashion and go their own way. mplayer is one example I know of.

Using "distcc" a 486 could have other units do the heavy lifting, yet retain the 486 flags. This is something I have not tried, but should work.

On another note, I recall compiling a Slackware 3.something kernel on a 386-16. If I recall right, the kernel took about 36 hours to cook up.

Jeez you guys have me beat:-) My oldest Slack box was a Pll 266, with 128 MB RAM....it ran XFce okay:-)

I finally tossed my 486
I can touch 4 pc's and 1 laptop from where I'm sitting and I'm the only one using a computer, so I didn't really "need" the 486 any more.

btw- last night, I booted my Slack 11 system: 200mmx, 32 meg ram, 4.3 G hd, and running fluxbox. Still ran like a champ

You guys tossing out your old PCs are going to regret it someday....just like I wish I hadn't pitched my perfectly functioning Commodore VIC-20 during a cleaning rampage.

I wrote some killer spaghetti code on that thing. Took two years for my college CS instructors to break my memory-saving ways.

Those programs saved to audio-cassettes would certainly have faded into the magnetic chaos by now but it would still be fun to pop in a game cartridge once in a while.

I do already.

Oh well, at least there's DOSBox!

I didn't go that far
My 128 is sitting on a table in the other room (which I use about every day) and my Amiga 4000 is on a stand against a wall in the living room.
Nope, didn't get rid of any CBM stuff. I'm a certifiable CBM fanatic!
Oh, my xm1541 just shipped today.