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sirius
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Post subject: 486 runs on dsl
 Posted: Jul 28, 2010 - 10:55 PM
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Joined: Feb 04, 2002
Posts: 813
Status: Offline
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| I have an old 486 32meg ram pc and I wanted to see if I a linux distribution would run on it. After some trial and error, I found the syslinux.iso flavor of damn small linux boots it to a gui desktop. The lomem boot option was used. |
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hubtones
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Post subject: RE: 486 runs on dsl
Posted: Jul 30, 2010 - 05:00 AM
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Member
Joined: Feb 28, 2001
Posts: 1035
Location: Philadelphia, PA USA
Status: Offline
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| With 32 megs, you have few gui options like blackbox, fvwm(95) and the like but it's going to be slow as all get out. Personally I'ld consider it a command line computer and leave it at that. |
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NoClue
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Post subject: RE: 486 runs on dsl
Posted: Aug 01, 2010 - 04:44 AM
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Site Admin
Joined: Jan 17, 2001
Posts: 10454
Location: Blackwood, NJ USA
Status: Offline
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For a command-line-only box, it wouldn't really matter which distro you used, would it?
sirius, how slow is the box with a lightweight gui? |
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sirius
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Post subject: RE: 486 runs on dsl
Posted: Aug 02, 2010 - 04:37 AM
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Joined: Feb 04, 2002
Posts: 813
Status: Offline
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| The box boots with a 3.5" diskette. I then can choose boot options. Then the cd-rom spins up and a Debian - like desktop is shown (no icons with a minimal task bar). Everything seems snappy enough, however, the cd spins up every time I load an app. If the box had more ram, the normal desktop can be used and I could even run firefox. I feel that dsl makes the box more useful because I could network the box if I wanted to and dsl has good auto configuration with nics. Ok, just booted up the 486, about a minute and a half and opened freecell and have nice graphics like with opensuse and game play is not sluggish. |
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sirius
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Post subject: RE: 486 runs on dsl
Posted: Aug 02, 2010 - 11:01 PM
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Joined: Feb 04, 2002
Posts: 813
Status: Offline
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I need to add the specs on the box:
A 'hyper' 486 has normal mode 33mhz and a turbo mode 133mhz considered to be a 'near pentium' performer in its day. Never bench marked it so can not say.
Upgraded the video card to one with 8meg of ram. |
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