Re: 386sx/25mhz compatibility
From: Moe Trin (ibuprofin_at_painkiller.example.tld)
Date: 09/16/04
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Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:34:01 -0500
In article <fe33cbe9.0409151228.675b4800@posting.google.com>, Nitro wrote:
>I have 2 (very) old Dell PCs and I was wondering if it was possible to
>install linux on them in a home network. I have looked at the
>compatibility charts of several distributions, but couldn't find all
>the info.
Yes - but kiss off any of the "popular" distributions, like Fedora,
Mandrake, or SuSE. Slackware or Debian are likely alternatives,
and sunsite has a large number of other distributions that might be
compatible. Try http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/
>The machines are Dell Dimension 386sx/25mhz computers. Both computers
>came with 4MB of ram, and I need to look into whether they can be
>upgraded to 16MB as that seemed to be the minimum system requirements
>to install any linux OS. I'd need to add hard drives also, since the
>current drives are both very small (20MB).
My firewall is running on a 386SX-16 with 8 Megs of RAM and a 213 Meg
hard drive. Are you _sure_ that the current drives are that small?
My first genuine IBM PC-AT came with a 30 Meg drive in 1985, and I don't
even think anyone was making 20 Meg drives when the 386SX came out in
1988. If that really is a 20 Meg drive, you probably also need a new
disk controller, because that's almost certainly a ST506 MFM dog, and
that won't work with any modern disk (or even a lot of obsolete ones
either).
>I'd like to set one up as a web server running apache. It would only
>be for experimental purposes, not for commercial sites. Is it
>unrealalistic to think these machines could be useful for this
>purpose?
With a 20 Meg drive - not likely (though there are distributions that
will fit on one or two floppies - they just don't do much). Trying to
run anything in 4 Megs of RAM is also going to be very iffy. You're
talking about a server, so that means you don't need a GUI - that will
reduce the requirements by a large extent, but you may need to be using
an older kernel because of bloat (2.0.x or even 2.2.x kernels are a lot
smaller than 2.4.x or 2.6.x. From kernel.org:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root linux 7550924 Feb 8 2004 linux-2.0.40.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root linux 19530258 Feb 24 2004 linux-2.2.26.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root linux 38404626 Aug 7 23:26 linux-2.4.27.tar.gz
-rw-rw-r-- 1 admin admin 44683888 Aug 14 11:13 linux-2.6.8.1.tar.gz
>Any suggestions as to what version of linux I should use?
See above.
Old guy
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