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UNIX for a 486?

Chuck(G) said:
AHA1542 - ISA controller with floppy support. AHA1540 - ISA controller with no floppy support. That's it. The 1540 was about as close to a a standard floppy controller in the ISA world as you could get. RH/NetBSD should certainly install on one. Heck, I've installed RH on a 486 with a AHA2840 VLB SCSI controller. Given the weirdness of VLB, that's pretty remarkable.
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Mine is a 1542CP, but NetBSD gave me an "probe: aha0 error" and then just stopped booting. As far as RH goes, I'm not surprised. You can install linux on a toaster!
 
The 1540x came in various flavors (I still have an old 1540 in a full-length card with the 8085 CPU on it quite prominent. It works just fine). There shouldn't be a lot of difference software-wise between 1540 models. Can you boot OS/2 on it?
 
I've not tried, but I could. I'll have to dig up those disks though. Would warp 4 work or should I look for something older? My card has a z80 cpu on it, would that make a difference?
 
I'll be trying out OS/2 sometime tomorrow. Not a permanent solution though, I'm deadset on *NIX :D .
I spent a little time getting X to run on this thing and here's how it turned out: Archimedes_X.jpg

It actually runs decently fast, but not enough to use it full time. FreeBSD seems to support every bit of my hardware flawlessly.
 
Cool. Good work.
Must give it a shot some time. Mind you I've had good luck with linux so far -touch wood. Just been spending the last few hours tidying up a few hdds with Dos and rearranging my OS collection.
 
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The BSD platforms were always a good combination of run on all hardware, and freebsd worked on getting all the software they could running so it was a personal favorite of mine. I'm surprised about RedHat running on a 486. I coulda sworn I had a v5.x that wouldn't install because it required a Pentium or higher but I could be off on my version or perhaps I was tinkering with a 386 although I'm fairly confident at the time it was a 486. I ended up finding very few linux distros that ran on a 486 anymore in the late 90s.
 
It's my fav. window manager. The screen shots a few years old now. Quite simple to setup. The 2 gig hard drive that it was on fitted in a Presario CDS 524 all-in-one fell over. I'm in the process of resurrecting it, along with some other 486 related projects.
 
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TN-048 said:
My 486 system is a Compaq prosignia vs with a 486dx2/66, 96 megs of ram, and 1gb SCSI drive on a Adaptec 1540cp isa card. Right now it runs FreeBSD 3.3, but I'd like to get back to something more traditional (like sysV). Does anyone know where I could come up with disks or images that would play nicely with my config?

Thanks -- TN-048
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I'm a happy user of Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (a.k.a. Potato) on my 486.

http://archive.debian.org/debian/dists/potato/main/disks-i386/current/
 
Weird, I've never heard of either of those before. It certainly seems like Dell Unix should play very nicely with my system, if I can get it installed (no tape drive..). It seems that DG/UX never ran on x86 hardware, but I could be wrong. Thanks for the new info!
 
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