On Wed, 23 Jan 2002 22:40:20 -0600 Dustin Puryear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> At 08:51 PM 1/23/2002 -0600, you wrote: > >There's a thrift shop called Here Today Gone Tomorrow on Burbank near > >Bluebonnet that has some 286's, 386's, and 486's which for some obscure > >reason are not selling well. I don't know the prices -- I got this info > >on the phone from a clerk. > > Wasn't there a project to get Linux running on 286 processors at some > point? I wonder where that left off. I tried a quick search but didn't pull > anything up. You're thinking of ELKS, the Embedded Linux Kernel Subset - an attempt and creating a Unix V7 equivalent for older PCs. It supports 8088, 8086, 80186 and 80286 CPUs (i.e. all the way pack to PCs and XTs), and the NEC V20/V30 (some laptops/palmtops/ old electronic organizers). I experimented with it around version 0.0.13 and again at around 0.0.40 or so. At that point, all it could do was boot and run a simple "hello world" init program. This was about 4 years ago. It's not tremendously further along now. It's up to 0.1.0-pre3, and it has a shell, login program (no password verification, tho), and some simple shell apps. Apparently it has some networking capability, since the docs mention that it has TCP/IP via SLIP. I've observed that the way development usually proceeds is that at any given time, there's one crazed programmer, furiously at work on it - for a few months at least. Then he gets sick of it, gets a job or something, and the project sits idle for months at a time. The tree's on sourceforge now, so there's probably a more reliable group of developers. The FAQ describes how to compile/play with the thing under regular Linux. It used to require a special compiler (i believe it was "bcc") and 16-bit tools (ld86/as86). But even then, you could run the 16bit binaries under Linux - now they've got a binfmt kernel module so it can directly run them -- Mark Orr [EMAIL PROTECTED] ================================================ BRLUG - The Baton Rouge Linux User Group Visit http://www.brlug.net for more information. Send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to change your subscription information. ================================================
