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Linux on their 486 class machines.

Was at a second hand shop today and came across a ex-uni book entitled "The Linux Network". Comes with a Slackware 3.5 on CD. So will give that a go at some point. The drive with MD on it died so the Presario it is running dos at the moment. I must say the book is very well layed out and I'm sure to learn a bit from it. Only cost a $1.
 
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Will try to install an old version of linux on my 486DX-4 100Mhz this weekend, propably test out puppy linux, and surfing the net :)
 
Cool. Just put Mandrake 6.1 on an 8 gig drive connected to my Acer Acros(486DX2/66,32 megs). Tried RH 6.0 but that threw a paddy. Couldn't set time zone for some reason and installation had to be aborted. SuSE 7.2 just screamed via the speaker trying to load the kernal image using the floppy boot disk and CD2.

With 1 meg of video ram things seem a bit smoother with Xwindows compared to the CDS524s 512kb. Hard drive is faster so overall performance seems the similar dispite it lacking 32 megs of ram compared to the CDS and it's old, now scrapped, 2gig drive. Also the extra cache on the mobo helps I guess. Using Window Maker again to reduce overhead. As quick as OS/2 v3 with 16 megs on the DEC, another DX2/66 with old 420meg hdd. Boots faster with more services available. Though to be fair that was to the login prompt. Loading KDE or Gnome would take much longer. Some funky video effects running The Gimp with 8-bit colour lol and of course those bigger X apps are'nt going to load but there's plenty of terminal apps. All good though. As they say variety is the spice of life.
 
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I ran Linux for years on 486 and Pentium class machines. One of my daily use machines is still a 486 - 66mhz, 32 megs of RAM, 1.2 gig root disk, 40 gig home disk, CGA video, Ethernet, SCSI, etc. It's running Debian 4.0, and the latest kernel. It sees a lot of use - but I don't run X on it.

-Ian
 
I ran RedHat Linux 6.0 for years on a AMD 5x86-133Mhz machine with the infamous PC Chips M919 VIP board. text based ran fine, its role was as a firewall/router. X11 ran with FVWM95 but was kinda slow.
 
One of the more interesting things to do is run the Red Hat 5.2 install using the 'redneck' language. Still have a Red Hat 5.2 machine running..... AMD K6-2/400, so, not a 486, but I did run RH 5.2 on plenty of 486's back in the late 90's.
 
I have Slackware 8.1 on my 486 DX4-100 with 64MB RAM (overkill I know, but it's worth it when running X)

486.jpg

I normally use the command line, but it runs Window Maker nicely, and it's still somewhat useful for internet tasks since I installed the following packages (mostly from later Slackware releases I think)

bzip2-1.0.5-i486-1.tgz
glibc-2.3.1-i386-3.tgz
lftp-2.5.4-i386-1.tgz
libpng-1.2.27-i486-1.tgz
links-2.1pre33-i486-1.tgz
openssh-4.4p1-i486-1.tgz
openssl-0.9.8i-i486-1.tgz
 
Chuck(G) said:
Anyone else use Linux on a 486 to pick up their email via UUCP over a dial-up line?
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Used to, back in the mid 90s. Ran a relay service in fact, with multiple phone lines and hundreds of connected nodes.

There was a DOS application called waffle that was quite popular in those days too. Ran and administered it before moving to Linux. Slackware, at the time, and in its very early days too!
 
I eventually settled on RH 5 to handle email, but used early slackware back in the day. Now I run my email server from an Orange Pi running Ubuntu. Fits in a shirt pocket and set me back $15 USD, shipping included. It also serves to broadcast web radio around the house using a small FM transmitter powered from a USB slot. Using a quad-core CPU with a 600MHz GPU seems to be such a waste, considering that there's not even X installed.

The hilarious thing is that I still have the 1500W Elgar UPS powered by 4 garden tractor lead acid batteries running the whole affair. I should probably replace it with a small 4-cell lithium standby pack. The cooling fan probably draws more than the OPi does :)
 
Back in the day when I first had a 24/7 internet connection at home, and wanted a router/home server, I started with an old 486DX2-66 machine, running FreeBSD, I believe version 4.0 at the time.
At some point I was pretty much my own 'ISP', because I had registered a domain for myself, and the machine did all the hosting for me. A mail server, FTPD, HTTPD, DNS, and various other services.
Over time it developed problems with the HDD, and since you can't put new HDDs in old machines, I had to upgrade the machine. Over the years, it went to a Pentium 133, Pentium Pro 200 and PII 350. They were all old machines that I had lying around, so it never cost me anything.
However, after the PII 350, I decided to finally get a cheap barebones low-end Pentium DualCore system, and that's what's still running today.

The 'domain' became smaller over time, as I figured it was easier to make use of free 'cloud' services than to host things myself, and having to configure, update and back up everything myself.
So my DNS is now hosted by afraid.org, and I use gmail to host mail for my domain. I no longer make much use of my own FTPD or HTTPD, since I share files with Dropbox, and I publish articles/blogs on Wordpress.
In fact, the HTTPD is currently not in a working state. An upgrade went wrong a while ago, and I have to reinstall the OS to get all the proper libraries back in working order, before I can get Apache installed again. But I can't be bothered really :)
 
Scali said:
They were all old machines that I had lying around, so it never cost me anything.
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Except power, some of those machines were pretty bad, made worse by barely 60% efficient power supplies!
 
pearce_jj said:
Except power, some of those machines were pretty bad, made worse by barely 60% efficient power supplies!
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Yea well, even with 60% efficiency, they're easily more power-efficient than a modern system with 80-90% efficient power supplies.
A 486DX2-66 only consumes around 4-5W I believe. Today we consider anything below 60W to be 'low-power' :)
Back then a 150W PSU was 'normal' for a desktop/miditower, and if you had a 'server/workstation' bigtower, you'd be the man with a 200W PSU.

Even the PII-350 was 'only' about 27W TDP I believe.
 
Scali said:
Yea well, even with 60% efficiency, they're easily more power-efficient than a modern system with 80-90% efficient power supplies.
A 486DX2-66 only consumes around 4-5W I believe. Today we consider anything below 60W to be 'low-power' :)
Back then a 150W PSU was 'normal' for a desktop/miditower, and if you had a 'server/workstation' bigtower, you'd be the man with a 200W PSU.

Even the PII-350 was 'only' about 27W TDP I believe.
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If one is willing to let a modern CPU run at idle, it will use about 20w (including graphics) which would be about half the power consumption of a PII + video card while providing much better performance.
 
You could also force the idle settings to stick on even when it's busy and you'd be getting a lot more done per watt spent.
I only really use vintage server hardware for fun and/or compatibility reasons.
 
krebizfan said:
If one is willing to let a modern CPU run at idle, it will use about 20w (including graphics) which would be about half the power consumption of a PII + video card while providing much better performance.
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Firstly, that wasn't the point (I was talking about a 486, which would still be a hard act to follow with today's hardware), secondly, you can do that now, but this was 15-20 years ago. Back then, 'modern' stuff was P3/P4/Athlon, which had horrible power management, if at all.

I was just making a point that what we consider 'efficient' today, is pretty ridiculously powerhungry by 1990's standards. I mean, as I said, a 'high end' case would have a 200W PSU. These days even a standard desktop will have a PSU in the range of 400-750W, and you can get PSUs up to 1500W if you really want to go there.
Especially in the P3/P4/Athlon era, power consumption and heat shot through the roof, and they never really recovered from there.
It was never a 'contest' of what the most power efficient system would be, so please spare me this kind of useless comment.

The performance of the 486 was just fine back then, by the way. UNIX installations were a lot more lightweight then than they are today.
 
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I think the easy thing to do is to get a 'Kill-a-watt' or other such device and just simply measure the current that the computer is drawing through the mains. That takes care of the hard drives, add-in cards, power supplies, etc. A few sample numbers would be interesting.

There is no doubt that modern machines are far more efficient. But we also expect them to do much much more. So excluding the CRTs, it wouldn't surprise me if the power draw at idle was not too far different.
 
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned "Monitor Misers"--little external boxes that connect between the monitor and the AC line and also between the PC and the keyboard. The idea is that when you quit typing for a long time, it powers the monitor off until you hit a key again. I've still got a couple of those kicking around.

CRT monitors could draw as much as the system itself.
 
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