386SX

[deadduck2]

can it be done? 43m hard drive no os its a boat anchor...floppy is B:\ drive.. 5inch floppy is A:\ drive.. already downloaded a ms-dos6.20 boot disk tried it in the B drive and did a B sys C: started to work but... stopped cold with a sector missing error..I want to install linux on this little thing from 1991. :cool:

[Energon]

Hmm... I put Slackware on a 386SX here. I had to take out the 51/2 drive and get a new floppy cable to make the 31/4 drive A: (it wouldn't boot from the B: drive in my case). Also had to get a CD-ROM drive that I put on the same IDE as the HDD. The big kick, though, is that I had to go from ~200M to I think 1GB. I honestly can't see anything worthwile fitting into 43M these days (but maybe you can?). Also had to upgrade to 16MB of RAM (which you almost 100% will have to do for any Linux distro).

The biggest things to keep in mind is that nothing will probably work right off, so you'll have to do some work, but it should work in the end (your sector missing error may be a DOS thing, but if not, you may need a new drive), that you have to be patient as things will run very, very slow (a kernel recompile took roughly 12-13 hours on this one), and that you really, really, really need to know the details on the hardware in the machine.

Best of luck with it! They make good, albeit slow, machines!

[deadduck2]

Thanks I'm gonna wait for the next comp show to get hardware..in the meantime i'll take it apart clean it and write down all numbers on the mobo. I know the pow supply is 135 watts I hope the mem is upgradeable..
;)

[bugfix]

Originally posted by deadduck2:
<STRONG>Thanks I'm gonna wait for the next comp show to get hardware..in the meantime i'll take it apart clean it and write down all numbers on the mobo. I know the pow supply is 135 watts I hope the mem is upgradeable..
;)</STRONG>

If it is upgradeable you'll be wanting 32pin SIMMS. I think tminos has some, trying PM'ing him.

[ph34r]

It can be done. I put Slack 7.1 (and then 8.0) on a 486sx33 laptop with a whopping 4mb of ram. I did have more disk space available though, but you should be able to fit enough on there to boot and connect to a network.

You should also read the 4mb Laptop Howto - lots of good information there on putting Linux on wimpy machines.

[deadduck2]

thanx for the encouragement ..32 pin simms I do belive the hard drive is too small ..will get back..i'm going to research slackware now..I'll be back. :cool:

[irlandes]

Since they have mini-linux on one or two floppies that run in ramdisk, with no HD, I would say the issue is just what you want to do with it. Some of these minis run as servers and as firewalls.