The 02.12.20 at 18:42, Ken Hough wrote:
But this machine never had a cdrom, and linux does not recognise it, it says its an ide tape device.
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Ah... pity, I fancied giving it a try - no kde or gnome, just fvwm or something similar. After all, this machine ran Win 3.11... :-)
I expect that you would have trouble trying to run any form of windows on your 386 PC.
Well, I assure you I used windows 3.10 when I bought that machine in 1991, and it run, with only 2 Mbytes of ram or so. Later, I increased it to 5 Mbytes. That machine was in use till 1995 or later, using dos 5 or 6 and win 3.11. It was never lightning fast, specially being an -SX, not a pure 386, but it served me well, I did not complain. You see, I only noticed it was slow when I first saw a pentium 90 ;-) - nowdays, a pentium would be considered horribly slow.
I'm currently playing with playing with an old Toshiba Satalite Pro 480 CDT (233 MHz Pentium with 64 MB Ram). KDE3 will run but there's so much swapping that it's not viable. icewm is sort of OK, but still sluggish.
Right here I have my Pentium 120 with 32 Mbytes (Suse 7.1 & W95), and it has kde and gnome; quite usable, but slow, specially with some apps like netscape (mozilla/netscape6 is horribly slow). Now that I'm used to my P-IV it certainly feels sluggish :-)
I might have some spare RAM chips that could work in the 386. Let me know what your PC needs and I'll have a look.
Don't worry, I'm not really using that machine. I only wanted to prove to myself that linux could be installed on it, and I have even managed to compile the kernel O:-) It is certainly more than what I expected. The only real use will be to retrieve my old backups (pctools), and move them over to CDs. Then, it will remain at part of my museum... er, junk pile ;-)
Don't know why Linux doesn't recognise your CDROM, I've used a variety of CDROMs ranging from old 8x drives to modern 56x units without any problems. Enybody else any suggestions?
That's something I don't understand, but it seems that the cdrom report itself wrongly as a tape machine :-? I could connect that cdrom to another machine and see what happens, it could be that the 386 is too old to cope with that - after all, cdroms were not invented yet, and windows came in 8 floppies (5 1/4) X-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson