Experimenting with installing Suse on an old computer.
I have been restoring to life my old 386SX-20, 91 vintage, and got it working with a 1.7Gb Hd (original was 80Mb), and dos5 (from a set 56 floppy disks, 5 1/4", holding the backup of that PC from that time). But of course, I want to try now if I can install linux on it O:-) I plugged and old CDrom (no dos drivers yet), found my original Suse 6.1, made a boot floppy, and booted up the 386. The install program does run, yes. It says it finds an "atapi tape drive" instead of the cdrom, which of course, fails to initialize. That means I'll probably have to use a network install, I guess. It continues, detects hda1 partition, and says: RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0 Uncompressing............................. And it stops right there - it has been at that exact point for half an hour, I think, and I doesn't seem to have intention of going on. What do you think, could it be possible to install suse 6.1 on that machine? Should I try an older version? I think I have 5.2 somewhere. Or should I try another type of distro? Perhaps I could make my own boot disk, compiling a 386 kernel for it, but I don't know if and how I could do that. Ideas? -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
The 02.12.15 at 14:56, Carlos E. R. wrote:
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0 Uncompressing.............................
Update: I got past that point, using floppy image eide02, instead of the default eide01. Now I get past keyboard and language detection, and I'm right now trying to get it to recognise either the cdrom (prefered) or the network card (and old isa card supporting ne2000/1000 and etherlink). So far, so good :-) So I should load the appropiate module; but, if I choose, for example "autoload of modules", it get stuck after loading 900Kb in to ramdisk. Trying to manually load a cdrom module (from the other menu) asks for the modules disk, and it stops at 1 Mbyte or so. Aparently, I can load the "ne" module, but the network doesn't seem to go up (the leds do not blink). Maybe I'll have to go for the PLIP connection... ugh, that would be real slow :-( By the way... how do I go about setting PLIP? I assume it is a printer parallel port connection. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
On Sunday 15 December 2002 14.56, Carlos E. R. wrote:
I have been restoring to life my old 386SX-20, 91 vintage, and got it working with a 1.7Gb Hd (original was 80Mb), and dos5 (from a set 56 floppy disks, 5 1/4", holding the backup of that PC from that time).
But of course, I want to try now if I can install linux on it O:-)
I plugged and old CDrom (no dos drivers yet), found my original Suse 6.1, made a boot floppy, and booted up the 386. The install program does run, yes. It says it finds an "atapi tape drive" instead of the cdrom, which of course, fails to initialize. That means I'll probably have to use a network install, I guess.
It continues, detects hda1 partition, and says:
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0 Uncompressing.............................
And it stops right there - it has been at that exact point for half an hour, I think, and I doesn't seem to have intention of going on.
What do you think, could it be possible to install suse 6.1 on that machine? Should I try an older version? I think I have 5.2 somewhere. Or should I try another type of distro?
Perhaps I could make my own boot disk, compiling a 386 kernel for it, but I don't know if and how I could do that.
Ideas?
How much RAM do you have?? Sounds like you are running out of it... I tried the same thing as you did, but lacked memory.. NFS and FTP install is demanding when it comes to memory consumption.. There is a HOWTO on installing on box3es with small ammount of RAM, i suggest you read that. -- /Rikard ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Rikard Johnels email : rjhn@linux.nu Web : http://www.rikjoh.com Mob : +46 70 464 99 39 ------------------------ Public PGP fingerprint ---------------------------- < 15 28 DF 78 67 98 B2 16 1F D3 FD C5 59 D4 B6 78 46 1C EE 56 >
Rikard Johnels wrote:
On Sunday 15 December 2002 14.56, Carlos E. R. wrote:
I have been restoring to life my old 386SX-20, 91 vintage, and got it working with a 1.7Gb Hd (original was 80Mb), and dos5 (from a set 56 floppy disks, 5 1/4", holding the backup of that PC from that time).
But of course, I want to try now if I can install linux on it O:-)
I plugged and old CDrom (no dos drivers yet), found my original Suse 6.1, made a boot floppy, and booted up the 386. The install program does run, yes. It says it finds an "atapi tape drive" instead of the cdrom, which of course, fails to initialize. That means I'll probably have to use a network install, I guess.
It continues, detects hda1 partition, and says:
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0 Uncompressing.............................
And it stops right there - it has been at that exact point for half an hour, I think, and I doesn't seem to have intention of going on.
What do you think, could it be possible to install suse 6.1 on that machine? Should I try an older version? I think I have 5.2 somewhere. Or should I try another type of distro?
Perhaps I could make my own boot disk, compiling a 386 kernel for it, but I don't know if and how I could do that.
Ideas?
How much RAM do you have?? Sounds like you are running out of it... I tried the same thing as you did, but lacked memory.. NFS and FTP install is demanding when it comes to memory consumption.. There is a HOWTO on installing on box3es with small ammount of RAM, i suggest you read that.
As I remember, those old 386SX boxes typically had perhaps only 4 MB of RAM (or even less). Unless you can find say 16 MB or better 32 MB, you will be better off dumping the 386SX. Once the system starts swapping to disk, the PC will run very slowly. In any case, it will not be fast! Good luck Ken Hough
The 02.12.17 at 14:12, Ken Hough wrote:
As I remember, those old 386SX boxes typically had perhaps only 4 MB of RAM (or even less).
Correct, this one has 5 Mb, and I think it came with 2 or 3.
Unless you can find say 16 MB or better 32 MB,
Probably expensive, unless found on a junk pile.
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:-)
Once the system starts swapping to disk, the PC will run very slowly. In any case, it will not be fast!
That, I expect :-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
Carlos E. R. wrote:
The 02.12.17 at 14:12, Ken Hough wrote:
As I remember, those old 386SX boxes typically had perhaps only 4 MB of RAM (or even less).
Correct, this one has 5 Mb, and I think it came with 2 or 3.
Unless you can find say 16 MB or better 32 MB,
Probably expensive, unless found on a junk pile.
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:-)
Once the system starts swapping to disk, the PC will run very slowly. In any case, it will not be fast!
That, I expect :-)
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. 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. 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 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. Regards Ken Hough
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
The 02.12.16 at 18:50, Rikard Johnels wrote:
Ideas?
How much RAM do you have??
Just 5 Mb O:-)
Sounds like you are running out of it...
I got the install running using an alternate floppy image, eide02 instead of 01. It takes like 10 or 15 minutes to boot up, but it does boot :-)
I tried the same thing as you did, but lacked memory.. NFS and FTP install is demanding when it comes to memory consumption..
Yes, ftp says right away there is not enough memory. NFS gives a try, but the network card might be bad, the leds do not blink. I have already formated the HD on another PC, a small ext2 partition below the 1024 cylinder, a swap and a root. Pity the install does not use that swap.
There is a HOWTO on installing on box3es with small ammount of RAM, i suggest you read that.
I'll have a look, thanks :-) -- Cheers, Carlos.
The 02.12.15 at 14:56, Carlos E. R. wrote:
I have been restoring to life my old 386SX-20, 91 vintage, and got it working with a 1.7Gb Hd (original was 80Mb), and dos5 (from a set 56 floppy disks, 5 1/4", holding the backup of that PC from that time).
But of course, I want to try now if I can install linux on it O:-)
I did it - but I had to cheat O:-) - I had to use a floppy using the eide02 image (default is 01). - Loading the modules disk failed. - The install said the CDrom was an ATAPI tape drive, so it failed. - Network did not work, although the drivers did load, perhaps because of bad card. FTP install complained of insufficient memory. NFS install was not possible. For the record, it did not even work from another computer on which I know the network does work (I tested importing the nfs disk from the installed 7.1 - so I guess it is not missconfigured, specially on the server side (8.1)). - HD install, ie, copying the /cdrom/suse/* to an vfat partition, as explained on the manual, chapter 2.4 and 3.8 does not work. It fails when "Trying to loopmount /tmp/loopmount/emil/suse/setup/inst-img", which is an 11Mb file that does exist - perhaps the problem is that I don't have enough memory (5Mb), but I personally think that the source HD must be different than the target for the install. - So, I had to plug the target HD to another PC (a pentium 120), where I ran the install from CD. Before removing the hd, I edited the fstab and lilo.conf files. On the target, I booted from my install floppy, selected "start installed system", and then run lilo, which I had previously prepared. After reboot, I had linux suse 6.1 "running" on my 386SX-20 :-) It takes about 10 minutes to boot, including e2fsck; Yast crashed making kernel panic: something about interrupt handler killed (that will make configuring somethings a bit more unconfortable). Top says it has 3240Kb (184k free 112k buf), with 1336K swap used (1236k cached). Load is a bit less than 20%, all that being due to top itself; as the machine has 5Mb, maybe those two missing are used by the kernel. Any command causes a lot of disk activity, so I have disabled apache. It is slow, but no more than I expected; in fact, it is quite reasonable. Shall I put it to the test, and try to compile the kernel? X-) -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson
participants (3)
-
Carlos E. R. -
Ken Hough -
Rikard Johnels