Linux Kills Support For Intel’s 386 Processors | Muktware
Any 386 boxes out there? What do you use them for?
On 2012-12-14 00:46, chief sealth wrote:
>
> ‘Linux Kills Support For Intel’s 386 Processors | Muktware’
> (http://tinyurl.com/cwnkp2b)
>
> Any 386 boxes out there? What do you use them for?
I have one with SuSE 5.2 or 6.2, I don’t remember. I have not used it in
a long time, it part of my little personal museum. Or, I need it to
recover old backups.
To me it does not matter really that support ceases, I don’t intend to
update it 
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Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 12.1 x86_64 “Asparagus” at Telcontar)
So I think its already been dead for a long time. but it does bring back old memories of DOS and even Norton Utilities. I once did a side job with another individual and we were contracted to rebuild 500 IBM PC’s with a i386 motherboard’s. We had six weeks to complete, we both had day jobs and worked at night at the place where the PC were being rebuilt. I never saw so many PC’s from the inside again. I can say that the old IBM PC’s and even its case, were built like battleships. Still I do not miss memory or hard disk problems like we had back then. It was good while it lasted, but Rest In Peace i386.
Thank You,
I owned one of those for a while. That was a long time ago. I replaced it in 1995, with a 586 system. I never had linux on the 386.
My first Linux box in 2000 ran on an i686 which was already five years old by then. I think my previous DOS box from 2001 had a 386.
Many years ago (circa SuSE Prof. 6.4) I tried to resurrect a 486sx Packard-Bell
box. What a pain. Just buying all of the memory and cache chips cost a small
fortune (more than a brand new low end host with 10x the performance).
So… I ended up with a box with 20M of memory (the max), I overclocked the
25Mhz processor to 33Mhz…
It had one of those Oak video boards, so I could at least to 800x600 at 16 colors.
At the end of the day… it was WAY too slow even in console mode for me. I did
manage to get the 10Mbit ethernet running and was able to use a text based
browser… shoot, I even got KDE to come up!! But it was really just a very
expensive experiment… NOT recommended.
I would hate to think of how bad it would have been with a 386…
Don’t know if the call center and delivery service is still using but had 9 order taking and two dispatch i386 network machines running Mandrake 9.0 Linux from 1999 to 2004. 17 chicken outlets and the home food delivery service were connected to the call center using a 24 line modem pool bank with modems at the stores tied to simple serial printers. Worked fast, dependable for the roughly 1000 orders per day and store reprints of about 2500 per day. Shows what could be done using a technology that was based on principals routed in 1950 style printing terminals.
If i386 machines were still available in mainstream this sort of application would still be quite viable but … could be better suited to modern systems with each system using email or texting.
There’s more oomph in a Raspberry Pi… same money and pain… sure, you might
make a successul anti-landfill argument, but probably at the expense of killing
trees on power consumption alone. Simply put, there’s probably no good reason
to keep an exiting 386 running… (but who knows…)
On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 06:03:38 +0000, Chris Cox wrote:
> sure, you might make a successul anti-landfill argument,
There are usually electronics recycling places that will take equipment
off your hands for no cost. That’s what I’ve done with mine.
Also, comparatively speaking, the “green” argument doesn’t wash because a
386 generally takes more power than a RPI.
Jim
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Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 18:54:16 +0000, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 06:03:38 +0000, Chris Cox wrote:
>
>> sure, you might make a successul anti-landfill argument,
>
> There are usually electronics recycling places that will take equipment
> off your hands for no cost. That’s what I’ve done with mine.
>
> Also, comparatively speaking, the “green” argument doesn’t wash because
> a 386 generally takes more power than a RPI.
Which you mentioned and I forgot between the time I read it and the time
I posted.
Jim
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Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
On 12/16/2012 07:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> I forgot between the time I read it and the time I posted.
join the crowd…and, it gets worse with time!
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dd
On Sun, 16 Dec 2012 22:25:19 +0000, dd wrote:
> On 12/16/2012 07:54 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> I forgot between the time I read it and the time I posted.
>
> join the crowd…and, it gets worse with time!
Dad always said memory was the second thing to go. But I’ve probably
told that joke here before. (He told it numerous times himself)
Jim
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Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C
Will dropping i386 stuff out of kernel make new kernel a super man (who just got rid of kryptonite from his pocket) ?
In future will it reduce the size of kernal rpm in openSUSE ?
On Mon, 17 Dec 2012 03:26:01 +0000, vazhavandan wrote:
> Will dropping i386 stuff out of kernel make new kernel a super man (who
> just got rid of kryptonite from his pocket) ?
Unlikely. It’ll reduce the number of lines of code, but in general, it’s
stuff that has to be maintained by #ifdefs in the code to accommodate the
386 platform.
> In future will it reduce the size of kernal rpm in openSUSE ?
Probably not appreciably.
Jim
–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C