Is it worth it? (Absolutely!!!)

[01micko]

I scored an old IBM 486 50MHz 16MB ram. Is it worth ripping out the hard drive asuming it works, and installing 412 as a frugal straight off the cd, through my other machine? The cd drive in the machine is dead and all the slots are ISA. Was so hoping it was a pentium!!! A little more ram too! I do not want to spend a cent on it. HD is 512MB, was thinkin 80MB swap. Maybe use fat free?

[HairyWill]

much pain will follow

[01micko]

much pain will follow

He he. So therefore I'd be a glutton for punishment! Still, not a total loss, scored 64meg edo ram and a 17 inch monitor in the AU$10 deal! Monitor works ok, the ram was too advanced for the 486, and I seem to recall IBM not liking edo.
I will continue the hunt for a P1! Or P2, cheap or free is good!

[E2001]

I will continue the hunt for a P1! Or P2, cheap or free is good!

Check your local Goodwill or Salvation Army. Ours always seem to have one or two old towers lying on the back shelves.

[Sage]

How many boards do you need? Send over your Jetstream and I'll help you load up. Or you could access your local Freecycle.

[vootie]

I scored an old IBM 486 50MHz 16MB ram. Is it worth ripping out the hard drive asuming it works, and installing 412 as a frugal straight off the cd, through my other machine? The cd drive in the machine is dead and all the slots are ISA. Was so hoping it was a pentium!!! A little more ram too! I do not want to spend a cent on it. HD is 512MB, was thinkin 80MB swap. Maybe use fat free?

Probably can work. Two ways to go... first the hard way:

First step, assuming there's a floppy, is to use an old school floppy linux:

http://www.linuxlinks.com/Distributions/Floppy/

...to make a swap partition on the hard drive, (suggest 128MB), that way Puppy has enough virtual memory to run (and thrash).

Then you put in a good CD drive, and boot Puppy from that. If the old box's BIOS can't boot from CD, that can still be done using something like:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/

Assuming it boots, the full install to HD option might be best.


Easier way: transplant the old hard drive to another system and install Puppy from that. Better yet, if you have another bigger (old) drive, say a couple gigs, then use that instead, but keep the 512MB drive and make it a 100% swap drive -- there's a speed advantage to two drives, especially with low memory, because otherwise the disk heads will be moving back and forth a lot between the user data and the swap area, big bottleneck -- two physical drives are much better, since there's two sets of heads.

[01micko]

@vootie
Your 'easier way' sounds interesting. I may, time permitting, give it a try.

[HairyWill]

but keep the 512MB drive and make it a 100% swap drive

Doing this will make the kernel think that it has over 512MB RAM. It will manage its ram accordingly, be lazy about freeing space and you will lose most of your processor cycles swapping.

[01micko]

but keep the 512MB drive and make it a 100% swap drive

Doing this will make the kernel think that it has over 512MB RAM. It will manage its ram accordingly, be lazy about freeing space and you will lose most of your processor cycles swapping.

However I got a PIII 600, and that idea might suit that. Really wanted a PI or PII. Reason being is for testing. I probably don't have time to stuff around with the 486, and if I do I'll install something by floppy.

Thanks for all these responses.

[hillside]

Go to http://www.linux.org/dist/ and search for minimalist distributions. You'll find a number that fit on one or two floppies. Most of these will run on your machine. They won't do much, but they are fun to play with and you can usually get some really basic text editing done on a machine like that. You could, for instance, build web pages!!!

[01micko]

Go to http://www.linux.org/dist/ and search for minimalist distributions.

Thanks for the link

[Bruce B]

My 486 over a period of time became something else.

I don't remember how it went as it was a long time ago. Little by little it grew and changed.

In your case:

Is the floppy drive good?

Is the hard drive serviceable for something?

A sound blaster card?

A decent video card?

The tower?

Etc?

---------------

If Puppy didn't put a 486 with 16mb to sleep, I'm afraid it would put me to sleep.

That doesn't mean every piece of hardware is to be thrown out, not for a true blue scrounger or dumpster diver :)

[vootie]

but keep the 512MB drive and make it a 100% swap drive

Doing this will make the kernel think that it has over 512MB RAM. It will manage its ram accordingly, be lazy about freeing space and you will lose most of your processor cycles swapping.

Interesting comment HairyWill... is that based on recent evidence, or educated speculation based on experience (i.e. "hard knocks"), or do you write swap code? I'm not up on recent kernel swapping algorithms, (though I've read they've improved over the years), and am curious what the results might be.

With only 16MB there's going to be mucho swapping anyway, it's a question of what's the sweet spot in swap size for Puppy in 16M. A lot of applications probably won't run at all unless the swap is larger than ordinary swap size formulas advise. How much thrashing happens also depends a lot on what's running. Running the latest Puppy on a 16MB 486 is so below spec it just sounds like a cool thing to try, to see how it fails, assuming it does -- will it be be somewhat slower, annoyingly slow, slow as a bastard, or unusable?

(Whatever the optimal swap size, 01micko should try to use an extra drive for it.)

[01micko]

Well...
The 486 is alive and kicking. I installed blueflops. It's a tiny text based distro that has busybox, ash, web browser, drivers for video and ethernet, and IRC. Not bad for two floppies. It's a base to build on. I've given up looking for a working cd-rom drive.
Really do need though a nic, old isa type. I'll find one somewhere.

BTW, formated 488MB ext 2, 24MB swap. Runs OK.

[justme]

I used the BASICLINUX3 two floppy set on my 66mhz with 32meg..

http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/

[01micko]

I used the BASICLINUX3 two floppy set on my 66mhz with 32meg..

http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/

Thanks for that. BL3 runs much faster and is a much better interface. Runs a true X with JWM. Impressive for a 3meg distro.

[01micko]

Only problem with BL3 is that it is a 2.2 kernel. It will be a real hunt for modules, such as sound drivers etc.
Found a ISA nic on ebay for 2 bucks in Sydney, $6 postage! Oh well!

[benali72]

Hi 01micko --

If you're having fun or enjoy the challenge of getting the 486 going, that's great.

If you're more interested in running Puppy than in pursuing a 486 project, here in the states I've found it pretty easy to get P-II range computers for free.

Sources for free PCs here include --

1. If you're in IT, almost certainly a co-worker has an old P-III or II or I they aren't using in their basement and would be glad to give away to you
2. Church rummage sales (usually give away P-IIs and older free for the asking, charge $10-50 for P-IIIs)
3. www.FreeCycle.org
4. www.FreeGeek.org
5. www.Craigslist.org

I see you're in Australia so I can only hope this helps. Good luck!

[01micko]

Thanks benali72.
I have scored a p111 600 with 256ram but no CD, but I found a burner to throw in it and should get it going over the weekend. The goal with the 486 is to get some flavour of puppy to run on it. I want to see if a 2.6.xx kernel will be happy on it. I may even create my own puplet for a 486 if I succeed.
Just waiting on a nic in the mail and still hunting for a cd drive. One good thing is that the old drive in it was IDE. Would have been a top notch machine in it's day.

BTW I have several machines running puppy ATM. All with a good spec. I want see how low puppy can go.

[01micko]

I found a working cd drive, a burner actually but the mobo and bios accepted it and now I'm trying to boot puppy, live from cdrom!. I know 4x series would probably not work but I tried anyway with 4.1retro. Signs were good, it made it to 'loading kenel modules' then hung. So then I downloaded a small one from Big_bass, Fatfree 2.15 Dillo. I decided on that because dillo is a nice lightweight browser which the 486 should run.
Ok, booted Fatfree, made it to X! However, X crashed before I could see JWM. I had cursor movement so this is a positive sign. I have not altered the hard drive from when I installed Blueflops so X was almost running in 40meg of resorces.
I'm gonna reformat and make a 60meg swap. I'll try to boot then, and if I can then I'll try to install, full install I think.

Puppy IS going to run on a 486!