Several days ago I booted my old 486 along with other electronic equipment to make sure they still work. The 486 remains full of life. My mind started wondering how I could use this computer.

This is a very old DFI 486 motherboard. The CPU is one of those 100 MHz 486/586 Cyrix hybrid add-ons (original CPU was a 33 MHz 486). ISA is the only bus, there is only 16 MB of RAM, a very noisy 512 MB hard drive, and a 10 Mbit/sec NIC. The video card is an ATI Ultra 8514, supporting 1024x768 @256 colors and (unbelievably) 1280x1024 @16 colors. The ATI card supports an old-style 3-button mouse. High-end equipment in 1991 but a 90-pound weakling today.

There is no CD drive. The IDE card (yes a card!) should support a CD drive. I could spend $5 on a used drive. However, this vintage 1991 BIOS will not support booting from a CD. There are no USB ports (they hadn't been invented yet). Therefore anything I do with this old box must be based upon booting from that very noisy hard drive or floppy disk.

16 MB of RAM is not a lot. I suppose I could shop online for some additional sticks (4Mx9 72-pin SIMMs??). I could expand the box to a whopping 48 MB.

For many years I ran WFWG 3.11 with the Norton Desktop 2.0 on this box. Ran well too. Once upon a time I successfully ran a GNU/Linux distro on the box. Strictly command line stuff and back in the 2.4 kernel days, but successful nonetheless.

A firewall seems a likely candidate, but my Linksys WRT54GL already suffices and at only 5W energy consumption and supporting 100Mbit/sec, is a more sensible deal. The 486 consumes almost 50 watts at idle.

A juke box? Perhaps, although at 6 MB a song, along with the OS, a 512 MB drive will only hold a few dozen songs. Perhaps the BIOS supports an old 3.2 GB hard drive sitting on my shelf, but I'm not holding my breath. This is a vintage 1991 BIOS.

Print server? My printer is already connected to my regular box, which usually is powered up during my waking hours. I don't print a lot anyway.

As far as modern distros, the only one I think that has a chance is Deli Linux. Nowadays DSL and Puppy expect more than 16 MB of RAM. Traditionally, I could run Slackware on this old box but do those old claims still hold with the 2.6 kernel? There are always old versions of distros. Slackware 11 might be an option. I could always first experiment with a virtual machine.

Except for weekend experiments, seems to me a sensible long-term solution is a dumb terminal. Perhaps to provide quick web surfing from a different room from my main computer. LTSP has long intrigued me and I'd like to learn more. I have not looked for information about using LTSP with Slackware, but hopefully some build scripts and how-tos are floating around somewhere.

Some questions:

1. Can I use a floppy to perform a PXE boot and install? I could remove and insert the hard drive into the removable drive bay on my current box, but learning something about PXE might be useful.

2. Is 16MB enough to run a basic X window manager? Or will the swap partition see no rest and expedite the death of the old hard drive? Perhaps a command line based box would be a "punishing" way to learn the links and lynx browsers.

3. Can I use a floppy to boot an LTSP terminal? From what I understand, yes. I don't know how much 16 MB of RAM will support, but as most of the software runs on the terminal server, perhaps 16 MB is sufficient. The trick is booting and connecting to the terminal. I would prefer running silent rather than with that very noisy hard drive.

Edit:
4. Through the Linux kernel, can newer/larger hard drives be used with an old BIOS when the BIOS does not recognize the drive? That is, can a floppy be used to boot into the new drive? I have a GRUB floppy that does that but would this succeed with the old BIOS? I thought I once had read that the Linux kernel can bypass the restraints of an old BIOS.

Go ahead: share your own ideas how to revive this box. Options are limited, but the purpose of this thread is to explore those limited options. Yes, the case could be converted into a hamster cage and the motherboard used as some sort of nostalgic geeky wall art, but let's stick to actually using a keyboard.

Pretty hot stuff for a 486. Maybe it even has a CPU heatsink!
Send me a self address stamped envelope, and I'll fill it to the brim with old SIMMs. I have a ton of 30-pin modules which I will NEVER use (I do not know what sizes they are). Are you sure your motherboard uses 72 pin SIMMs? With a 486 system, it could be either.

I have a lot of spare 8meg SIMMs, which would be enough to boost that machine up to 32megs.
Debian would just barely run with 16megs of RAM--maybe 2-3megs to spare, and that's assuming you manually edited /etc/inittab to comment out all but one of the TTY terminals (shaves about 3megs off of RAM usage). You'd need at least 32megs of RAM to do anything useful with X.
With its current hardware, it will not be useful as a graphical X terminal. You really need 100mbit ethernet for usable networked X. 10mbit is terribly slow.

Also, even if RAM isn't an issue a 100mhz processor makes for a sluggish dumb X terminal. One of my machines is a 120mhz Pentium which I've used as a dumb X terminal (it has a 100mbit NIC). Web browsing is definitely sluggish, while a 550mhz Pentium III is very responsive (again, with a 100mbit NIC).
Yes. Well, with Debian. (Sorry, I know this is the Slackware forum but I saw it in the list of recent posts and all I know is Debian.)
In Debian, 16MB is just barely enough...to run a lightweight window manager and one aterm window (at which point...what was the point?). I've heard Slackware is slimmer than Debian, but I don't know by how much.
Yes, unless your NIC isn't supported. I doubt it would be worthwhile without a 100mbit NIC. And 16megs of RAM isn't enough, especially since you want to avoid using swap.
You could upgrade some hardware here and there to make things more useful, but my general philosophy with these ancient computers is to never spend a dime on them. If I get my hands on junked hardware sufficient to make a good upgrade, then great. Otherwise, it waits in my pile of spare hardware.

I'm a bit fan of silent computing, so the first thing I'd do is physically remove all of the fans. If my old Pentium 120 can survive fanless, so can your old 486. The hard drive is the big problem, of course. My solution was to use a PXE boot floppy and set up diskless netbooting. However, I had 48megs of RAM to work with--plenty for X.

You could use an IDE->Compact Flash adapter to create a true solid state computer, but then that involves spending money on the project.

I think I'd try something a bit more exotic. I don't know about Slackware, but Debian boots up by first loading up an initrd image with a minimalistic busybox linux install. This loads up entirely into RAM, and it's designed to be very small. Normally, this minimalistic Linux OS detects your hardware and then loads up the "main" OS. But you can hack things so that instead it IS your OS.

The result is a very minimalistic and strangely restrictive linux OS, but one which fits entirely into RAM even if you don't have much. Hack in a copy of hdparm, and you can park the hard drive for silent computing. Put in a copy of telnet, and you can log into your main computer (I suggest telnet instead of ssh because it'll be smaller).

Or you can make a custom version of GeeXboX.
www.geexbox.org

Best

A. Mani

I used to run Slackware (3.5? I think) on my 386-20 (15.5 MB ram), yes and X too. Depending on how you configure and tweak it, it'd be fine as a spare browser. Or you could compile condor on it and the main box and have some fun with it that way...I did that for a while, though I think the overhead of managing the calls to the 386 from my more modern processor wasn't worth the return of computational power. Sort of like having an idiot assistant that you have to tell how to do everything to....

I wouldn't buy more memory for it unless you can get it really cheap, amazing how some of those old chips are A LOT more expensive per MB than newer chips...

I have an old 486 "headless" notebook (the LCD screen is broken) running with Slackware 4.0
It has 20 MB of RAM and a 300MB hard disk.
Nothing graphical, but it runs sshd so that I can access it.
What's the use for me? Just to run some networking tests once in a while, testing rsync scripts, etc. And for fun, to show that Slackware runs on minimal hardware.

I have some older hardware stacked up. One day I might even revive an old 386 board and try to install Slackware on it

I only recently retired a 486 running Slackware 3.6
It served me well as a firewall for many years.

You can definitely get around (most of) the BIOS limits of an old drive with the kernel. Learning about PXE sounds like fun too.

I used a 486 w/ two nic's for many years as a firewall / router I used coyote linux as it ran on a floppy , there are many other options out there.

Regards
JKZfixme

Well now, this is interesting. After posting I decided to pull the box from the shelf and open the case. The NIC is a 10 Mbps SMC EtherCard Plus Elite16T 8013WC. Curiously, the card has a boot ROM socket, although I have no idea where to find one these days. Amazing however, considering the age of this thing.

I also looked at the MIO-400KF I/O board, which provides the floppy and IDE controller. The controller supports two devices. Theoretically I could add a $5 CD drive, but as mentioned, the BIOS will not support booting from that device.

If I did try to revive this old box, the first thing to go is the PSU fan. Way too much noise!

Yes, there is a heat sink. No fan, thankfully!

I just checked: the sticks have 30 pins on each side, 9 chips. Chips are Goldstar GM71C4100AJ60, which a quick search reveals as 4Mbx1. Stick is GMM794000S60, which seems to indicate 60 ns.

Okay, perhaps a console only machine.

Also good to know. Funny though, I once had this box networked with my old NT4 box. Ran that way for a couple of years. Of course, the OS was on the hard drive, not being pushed through the network.

For starters I might try installing Slackware 11 on a 540 MB virtual machine with 16 MB of RAM.

That's all this would be: a "Is this doable?" type of project.

Anything special I need to know or just use a GRUB boot floppy?

There's nothing special you should need to do with GRUB. The only thing your old BIOS will do is load the kernel (and initrd if you use one). With that vintage BIOS, you'll need to keep those files under the 1024 cylinder limit (a good reason for having a separate /boot partition at the start of the drive). Once the kernel boots, it will use its own driver and the BIOS will no longer be used for disk I/O. You should have no problem fitting larger drive(s) if you have some. My 486 has a 1.7GB drive for the OS (1GB used) and a 6.3GB drive for MP3 and OGG files (100% full).

If you need another IDE port, look for an old SoundBlaster ISA card. Many of them had a built-in IDE controller and were bundled with an IDE cdrom as a "Multimedia Kit". My AWE-32 has one and the Slackware 12.1 installer still detects it.

If you can get a cdrom installed, you can 'dd' Smart Boot Manager (sbootmgr.dsk) to a floppy.
http://slackware.mirrors.tds.net/pub...inux/sbootmgr/
Just boot the floppy and it will in turn find your cdrom and offer boot it from a menu. Installation then proceeds as usual.

16MB of memory will be too painful unless you just want to turn it into something like a firewall appliance. 32MB will provide a reasonable CLI. 64MB will provide a slow GUI if you can get the old graphics card to work.

Here's a related thread I started just for fun a while back:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...e-left-631771/

Good Luck!

Something I did with an old 486, was I loaded some weirdo Linux distribution that I've never heard of that my dad gave me (I can't remember the name, either), threw in an extra, sizable hard drive, and it acted as a print server, router, firewall, SSH server and even hosted a little website for my family (it was a wiki that was used like a notepad for my mum and brother). Unfortunately, the power supply went, and I'll be damned if I can find a replacement.

(Lightly hits self in the forehead). Of course --- I knew that --- but my memory gets cloudier as I age!

This seems to be the consensus opinion. Perhaps I can experiment only at the command line unless I find some additional RAM. Of course, I could try to run a nominal window manager with the 16MB of RAM, if only to witness and experience the pain.

Well crap, I could have merely extended that thread rather than start a new one.

Those old boxes usually came with 200W PSUs. I suspect mom-and-pop computer dealers have many sitting on the shelves collecting dust. Only a few years ago I had to replace an older style PSU. A local mom-and-pop dealer sold me a used PSU for $25. Expensive, but I was in an emergency and simply finding an older PSU was worth the purchase for me.

You can use a larger more modern hard drive -just make sure that the first partition is of a size that the BIOS can recognize.
16MB is enough to run even with a 2.6 kernel -but you'd need another 16MB (at least) of swap in order to run X. Of course you probably won't want to do that. But keep in mind that the slack installer will need 64MB of RAM. You might install Slack-11.0 using the zipinstall which needs less RAM.
Your idea of using deli is good -it uses uCLibc so it should be more nimble.
I had a 75MHz 486 running with 16MB RAM and tested using various swap sizes. It really takes about 32MB total to get X to run with fluxbox and Opera browser -that will cache about 2-3 pages. Using less than 32MB total will barely run X and TWM or fluxbox. Using 128 or 156MB swap will make things go better. You may be watching for a couple-a-three minutes for some webpages to load. I have a pure Pentium I 100MHz that provides a 'standard' benchmark to compare to.
You know, another possibility is to use Slackware-8.1 libc5 is lighter than the new libs and you even get GNOME-1.4 with that! Power-on to ready Gnome desktop in as little time as it takes for you to have breakfast...

Yes, but not with recent Xorg 7.x. Grab a binary copy of XFree86 3.3.6 (you can get it at their ftp site) and you'll be fine. I did this with Ubuntu two years ago and it gave a mega performace boost to my Celeron 366MHz Notebook.

Just because I haven't seen the suggestion yet, I would go with Blackbox or Fluxbox as your desktop environment, if you are wanting to try out the sheer power of X on such a machine I used to run Fluxbox on an old Pentium 1 machine -- fell in love with it and still use it on my 2.0+gHz laptop.