OS for some OLD equipment

English Hardware
1

I’ve got a a situation where I need to resurrect some really old equipment
from the back of the shed. I need to get to a BIOS level that will support
5.25 and 8 inch floppies - the more recent ones don’t seem to like anything
but the 3.5 inch floppies and don’t even recognize the presence of the older
drives. I’ve got an old 486 box running but it accepts a max 512 meg of
ram. It has the ISA bus with serial ports, floppy interfaces, and IDE but I
need a usable OS. Disk space is no problem but that ram limit is killing me.

What can anyone suggest for a Linux version that will install and run a
reasonably complete kernel version in terminal mode on this old klunker?

–
Will Honea

2

Maybe Puppy Linux? I tried it a year or 2 ago on an old laptop with only 128MB of RAM. You just need to be able to boot from a CD. I couldn’t, so I used Smart Boot Manager on a bootable floppy, then could select the CD-R to boot from. You just need a way to set up the floppy to boot, and put Smart Boot Manager on it, and a CDROM drive. It’s been a long time since then, so I forget the details. Here’s a link to Puppy Linux:

http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Started.htm

I have an old PC that still has a floppy drive, that’s how I set up my boot floppy. If you don’t have that option available, this might not be any help at all.

3

Here’s a link to a bunch of lightweight Linux distros, maybe there’s something here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Linux_distribution

4

On 2014-12-15 23:38, Will Honea wrote:

> I’ve got a a situation where I need to resurrect some really old equipment
> from the back of the shed. I need to get to a BIOS level that will support
> 5.25 and 8 inch floppies - the more recent ones don’t seem to like anything
> but the 3.5 inch floppies and don’t even recognize the presence of the older
> drives. I’ve got an old 486 box running but it accepts a max 512 meg of
> ram. It has the ISA bus with serial ports, floppy interfaces, and IDE but I
> need a usable OS. Disk space is no problem but that ram limit is killing me.
>
> What can anyone suggest for a Linux version that will install and run a
> reasonably complete kernel version in terminal mode on this old klunker?

I think I test installed SuSE 5.3 or 6.4 in a 386sx with 5¼ inches
floppies (I would have to boot it to make absolutely sure which
version). No, sure, 6.4, I see the original 6.4 boot floppy near the box
with a pile of dust. Atchuá! That was a sneeze, in my language. I may
have to take a pill on antihistaminics.

I think that machine has 2 MiB RAM. I bought a network card for it, but
I never got it running in Linux, or get a connection. I thought of
getting the serial port running, and through it get ppp and network, but
I never did it. It is one of my backburner projects.

At least I can tell you that SuSE6.4 does work with a 486 and old, big
floppies. Dunno about 8", I never had one of those of my own.

Your machine only accepts 512 megs? That’s a problem, you need a bit
more. Although if what you tested is with MsDOS, it is possible it only
sees that. a 486 could have much more. Well, not very much, maybe 8 or
16, depending on the board. Dunno, I would have to read it up again. I
think the theoretical address space was 2^32, real much lower. Yiks…
my memory is fuzzy on details.

You might need preformat the hard disk. A small bit for /boot, then
swap. The installer will need use that swap to run.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

5

Will, you might be interested in this

http://www.toms.net/rb/

6

Carlos E. R. wrote:

> I think I test installed SuSE 5.3 or 6.4 in a 386sx with 5¼ inches
> floppies (I would have to boot it to make absolutely sure which
> version). No, sure, 6.4, I see the original 6.4 boot floppy near the box
> with a pile of dust. Atchuá! That was a sneeze, in my language. I may
> have to take a pill on antihistaminics.

Thanks, Carlos. A bit of Benedril or Certerizine fixed me up after
rummaging around the old equipment (and blowing the dust our of all the
pieces!).

> I think that machine has 2 MiB RAM. I bought a network card for it, but
> I never got it running in Linux, or get a connection. I thought of
> getting the serial port running, and through it get ppp and network, but
> I never did it. It is one of my backburner projects.
>
> At least I can tell you that SuSE6.4 does work with a 486 and old, big
> floppies. Dunno about 8", I never had one of those of my own.

Actually, even oS 13.2 32-bit starts to load (the 486 had a cdrom and even
reads from a DVD unit!). The live versions hit a kernel panic and the
install version begins to pick up io errors and hangs during the system
deployment phase but it does try…
>
> Your machine only accepts 512 megs? That’s a problem, you need a bit
> more. Although if what you tested is with MsDOS, it is possible it only
> sees that. a 486 could have much more. Well, not very much, maybe 8 or
> 16, depending on the board. Dunno, I would have to read it up again. I
> think the theoretical address space was 2^32, real much lower. Yiks…
> my memory is fuzzy on details.
>
> You might need preformat the hard disk. A small bit for /boot, then
> swap. The installer will need use that swap to run.

Good suggestion - hadn’t thought of that.

–
Will Honea

7

deano ferrari wrote:

>
> Will, you might be interested in this
>
> http://www.toms.net/rb/
>

LOL! This would probably work but I’m not sure I have any machines with
workable 3.5 inch floppy drives to make the boot diskette!

–
Will Honea

8

HighBloodSugar wrote:

> Maybe Puppy Linux? I tried it a year or 2 ago on an old laptop with only
> 128MB of RAM. You just need to be able to boot from a CD. I couldn’t, so
> I used Smart Boot Manager on a bootable floppy, then could select the
> CD-R to boot from. You just need a way to set up the floppy to boot, and
> put Smart Boot Manager on it, and a CDROM drive. It’s been a long time
> since then, so I forget the details. Here’s a link to Puppy Linux:
>
> http://puppylinux.org/main/Overview%20and%20Getting%20Started.htm
>
> I have an old PC that still has a floppy drive, that’s how I set up my
> boot floppy. If you don’t have that option available, this might not be
> any help at all.

I need to look at the latest Puppy Linux - the version I have here is really
sparse on the disk hardware/utilities side. It does boot from the CD,
however.

–
Will Honea

9

HighBloodSugar wrote:

> Here’s a link to a bunch of lightweight Linux distros, maybe there’s
> something here
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightweight_Linux_distribution

Ah! A very good link for what I need. Thank you.

–
Will Honea

10

That RAM may not be a problem. I have openSUSE 13.1 running with LXDE on an IBM ThinkPad 600E with 544 MB RAM and a Pentium II processor. Yes, it’s slow. This was mostly an academic exercise.

If the Linux approach has trouble with the old drives, you may want to consider using (heresy) MS-DOS, Windows 95, or Windows 98SE. They are actually more age-appropriate for the hardware. Windows 98SE runs on my ThinkPad 310ED with only 128 MB RAM.

I used Win 98SE on an old box to do a one-time transfer of files from 5.25 in. floppies to media that could be read on a fairly modern machine. I did have to hunt for a machine with a BIOS that recognized the 5.25 inch drive.

Good luck with your endeavor.
Howard

11

On 2014-12-16 07:19, Will Honea wrote:

> LOL! This would probably work but I’m not sure I have any machines with
> workable 3.5 inch floppy drives to make the boot diskette!

I do… This desktop I intentionally built with a 3.5 unit, although I
have doubts about it working.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)

12

On 2014-12-16 07:17, Will Honea wrote:
> Carlos E. R. wrote:

> Actually, even oS 13.2 32-bit starts to load (the 486 had a cdrom and even
> reads from a DVD unit!). The live versions hit a kernel panic and the
> install version begins to pick up io errors and hangs during the system
> deployment phase but it does try…

The instant it loads code that expects a 586 it crashes. That target was
dropped some years ago.

You really need to try an old release, not only because of tested floppy
compliance, but because of the smaller memory expected.

–
Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)