Hello,

I would be interested to make a try of Slackware on a relatively old machine of type 486 DX. I may boot actually with the still working usb.

Which possibilities would offer Slackware for this type of hardware?

thank you

If that machine even has USB, it will be USB1.1 or older - very very very very slow. Not suitable for booting off of, even if the BIOS allows it. Better to use an old small PATA drive if you can find one lying around. Or if you're willing to pump some money into the thing, you might be able to get PATA converters to work with a small compactflash card.

Some points to consider:
The last Slackware release with a kernel that would boot with 64MB RAM was 13.1
Later releases require 128MB RAM.
If the CPU does not support the CMOV instruction, the boot will hang unless the non-smp kernel is used.
A successful full install requires 10-15GB of disk drive space, but can be reduced by leaving out optional package series. Older hardware can have BIOS limitations on the size of disk drive partitions. I have had to partition the primary boot partition to be 4GB or jumper hard disks down from their maximum capacity to meet these limitations.

1 members found this post helpful.

You are kidding, right?

That's not "a relatively old machine" but an ancient machine, built somewhere while the rising of Roman Empire, with glorious specs like a processor at 40MHz, no mathematics co-processor, and with some real luck sporting 4MB RAM, but the usual was 1MB.

I believe you cannot run Slackware, or any modern Linux distribution on this toaster from DOS era...

Consider that in the 486DX era, a really huge and expensive hard-drive was about 256MB as size.

I had a 120MHz 486DX at one point. All 486DX have a built-in math coprocessor. Only the 486SX versions lack this (and most SX versions also use a data bus half as wide).

If this is just a project for having a little fun with an old version of Slackware, I'd try to see if Slackware 3.3 will work as a starting point. But it might be possible to use up to Slackware 11.0 or so.

13 members found this post helpful.

I can't remember which, but I have 10.x or 11.0 installed on a 486 system.

Hard drive is 20 GB. The system is sluggish and continually uses swap. I never tried running X on this thing.

10 Mb/s NIC. Basic networking is fine. File transfers are slow.

Doable yes. You'll need lots of patience though.

If I can remember that far back, my old 486 was so slow that it could not even play the new miracle file format called 'MP3' ! Nowadays, audio-players that are only 3cm by 4cm in size can play them easily ... even movies too ...

My award of 'Masochist-of-the-Month' .. goes to .. @Xeratul

(Hint: click on the right-pointing arrow, to see the Thread which quote came from)

I hope I can get OP to join me in my **NO-GUI** 'true'-Unix world

btw, how much RAM does your 'new world' have? Tell us what you get working! FUN (really)!

p.s. Are you sure the bios has an option to boot from usb?
IF not, there's ways to https://www.raymond.cc/blog/doing-th...ed-using-plop/ (another FUN retro project)

p.p.s. For all the GreatSlackers (who seem to make up >half of LQ),
who might want to have FUN trying to find the smallest/oldest,
I think qemu (& other) can simulate a 486 CPU with its many --options

As one of the middle aged folks around here, lets clarify a few things.

A 486-DX, does have a math co processor, although the kernel has soft float and its pretty efficient so that isnt really Germaine.

This machine if it really has USB, isn't likely to boot from it. Odds are actually very good it can't even boot off a CD. Its almost certainly going to be on a daughter card. It may or may not even be PCI. If its not PCI that could be a problem for recent kernels. Since we think it has USB, its probably PCI because while not impossible, I have never seen a ISA or EISA USB daughter card.

Even later 486 were not likely to be equipped with more than 16MBs of ram or so. You might get super lucky and find out it has 64, or it might have as little as 4. If this machine was a 'server' it might even have 128MB but that would make this a very very expensive machine.

If it was a sever you might have SCSI disks, and those might offer reasonable performance even by today's standards (remember you are going to be doing a great deal of swapping), More than likely its going to have really slow PATA disks. If its a single drive you and its original you are likely looking at 240MB to 4GB of space.

Quite honestly, I would stick to Slackware 10.2 or older. Maybe even 8.1. 8.1 brought a lot of useful changes. Don't go older than that.

Realize as much as I hate to say it, as it makes me feel old. This is not going to be much more than toy. While local things like word processing will be as functional today as they were back in mid 90s (better because you will have 1999 era slackware on it) the rest of the world has moved on. Good luck rendering a modern website on that thing. It would probably take 1/2 an hour to start a recent FF build on that thing and you'd run out of memory before Slashdot loaded.

2 members found this post helpful.

How much RAM does this machine have?

I started my Slackware experience with 486DX, 8 Mb ram, 500 Mb HDD. I ran Slackware 2.3, and was quite happy with it. (I guess that it was 1995 or so, which was an era of MS windows 3.1).

I remember that I used that machine at my university dormitory, dialed up PPP to connect to the network, used a terminal to see the department BBS, not to mention the netscape browser. Good old days!

So I think this conversation can be a little bit easier if you let us know what you're going to do with that relatively restricted machine.

I would have to say slackware 4
but it's going to be hard to find the floppys ( or a machine to write them)
I have no idea how your going to get it working with out floppys

This computer has the following memory:

Ram 32 Mo

Sorry that it is so little. I know that it could run DamnSmallLinux in the past. This was working, but Slackware could probably give this relatively old Linux.

Non-gui is ok, but I would like to compile a bit of programmes, which are made on X11/Intrinsics (low requirement Motif).

The machine is destined to office use, very similarly as DamnSmallLinux.

Why Slackware?
Because it is probably one of the best distro. Nice Linux (without SysD,... and stuffs on modern PCs).

Oh, that will run Slackware 4.0 in command-line mode just fine.