I know no recent version of any Linux will most likely not support MCA designs. What's the latest version I could run on something like a model 9556? They max out at 16meg max RAM size and come with XGA2. Running Linux on them could bring new life to all my PS/2 computers that I don't already run OS/2 on.
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what's the latest version of Linux that will run on microchannel computers?
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glitch
Veteran Member
IIRC, MCA support under Linux was never great. You might check NetBSD as well, they're sort of known for running on everything, including toasters (literally, someone has a NetBSD toaster).
I use one of my MCA PS/2s as a general DOS machine and terminal. You can use telnet or SSH to access another Linux box (check out the ssh2dos project, it does work, and 386 enhanced mode is actually fast). Built-in parallel and serial means it's a decent machine for data interchange in the workshop. Plus, it's a small pizzabox form factor so it's out of the way.
I use one of my MCA PS/2s as a general DOS machine and terminal. You can use telnet or SSH to access another Linux box (check out the ssh2dos project, it does work, and 386 enhanced mode is actually fast). Built-in parallel and serial means it's a decent machine for data interchange in the workshop. Plus, it's a small pizzabox form factor so it's out of the way.
salamontagne
Experienced Member
As Glitch has said, support for the microchannel was never great in linux. That being the case, you *might* have success with Slackware. Its always run on the older systems I've tried, thou your going to be looking for an archived version...Look into what kernel it was based around. I'd *TRY* something in the 2.2 era, at least to start with. Once you've done that, it *MIGHT* be possible to upgrade some of the core utils (GCC and such). I'm not realy sure what your trying to do with this machine so i really cant say much beyond that. Best of Luck to you - I dearly miss my PS/2...
Mike Chambers
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Debian 3.0 "Woody" should run.
was going to say this. Woody ran just fine on my model 8580 tower. i decided to downgrade it to either Debian 2.0 or 2.1. i forget exactly which i have on there, i have it booted into DOS just now and it's busy copying some data over the network so i can't check. it was slow with Woody since it only has 16 MB of RAM. very slow. the older version runs amazingly well! it even makes a fantastic little web server with apache 1.x for static files over my MCA Etherexpress.