The 02.12.18 at 09:55, Ken Hough wrote:
you will be better off dumping the 386SX.
What for? It does run dos and win 3.11 ;-)
I want it for retrieving old data backups from 5 1/4 floppies, and storing them on CD by another machine. Installing linux on it is just a past-time, to see if it is possible. Not too long ago, it was said that one of the assets of linux was making use of old hardware O:-)
Why not move the 5 1/4 inch drive to another PC alongside the 3 1/2 inch drive? That's what I did. Far less trouble! All you need is one of the old style ribbon cables which have both types of connector.
Ah, yes. But the backup program I used at the time was Pctools backup, version 6, maybe 7. It doesn't work even on my old Pentium 120, it seems to be very hardware dependent :-(
If you are desperate to use the 386, tell us what kind of memory chips you need. We might find some. I still have a few from that age.
No, not desperate: I'm just curious. O:-)
True Linux can run on old style hardware (and without crashing), but compared with DOS, is a big operating system and needs space to really go.
I know.
I still run an AMD 486DX2 80 machine with SuSE v6.4 as a file server. This PC has 18MB of RAM, A 3 1/2 inch drive, a 5 1/4 inch drive a CDROM and two hard drives. The hard drive controller sits on a VL bus (32 bit, clocked at 40 MHz -- maybe faster than modern PCI) so overall the PC is accepably fast as a server. Graphics card also sits on VL bus. Even so, it's not worthwhile trying to run X. I normally run this PC without a keyboard or VDU and 'talk' to it via LAN.
Yes, that one is better than mine :-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson