Aaron Binns wrote:
> I have this 386 lying around and I
> know it works.. so why throw it away?
That's the best attitude to have with old hardware. There's always some
use for it. You've just got to find out what the best use is.
> For all the talk of a basic 386 running Linux .. is it really true?
Yes. Sort of... :-) I've run a cut down version of Linux (ELKS) on a 286
(and almost got it going on an XT - it *said* it was booting Linux, I
think it may have been lying just to make me feel good :-), a 386 is
easy to do - so long as you don't want to make it do much...
> or have I found my first myth & untruth about
> Linux? heck Id been looking forward to seeing Linux run on the old
> box.
Well if you just want to see Linux run on it go and download something
from Ken Yap's excellent resource page (he seems to be too modest to
mention it himself, but it's great for this sort of thing)
<http://members.nbci.com/ken_yap/>. I can guarantee that ELKS
<http://www.elks.ecs.soton.ac.uk/> will run on your machine (ELKS will
run on any 8086 based machine I think, I seem to remember booting it on
a PIII just to see what would happen and being vaguely amused that it
ran at about the same speed as on a 286). Won't do much (pretty much no
networking for example, so no use for your firewall plan), but it's fun
to play with. You could also run SmallLinux
<http://smalllinux.netpedia.net/> on it, which would be far more useful,
and has a reasonably active developer base. Or there's the other small
distros people have mentioned (haven't tried them, can't comment). It is
possible to install one of these small floppy based distros onto your
20Mb hard drive: the basic procedure is usually to boot from floppy,
mount the hard drive, format the hard drive for an ext2 (or Minix, if
you're crazy enough to try and install ELKS to hard drive) file system,
copy across the necessary files, configure, reboot and hope it works.
The other way is to stick the hard drive in a more powerful machine
(useful if you're running out of memory), and do the same as above, then
stick it back in your 386. This assumes you aren't using a small distro
that will install directly to hard drive for you (and where's the fun in
that? :-). Could be worth a look at the Linux From Scratch stuff
<http://lfs.mirror.aarnet.edu.au/>. You might also run into memory
problems with some of the installation programs, that this method would
get around. Personally, I think it may just be possible for you to use
this machine as a firewall/router if you can install one of the small
distros to hard drive, and if you're willing to put in a *lot* of time
getting it set up. You certainly won't be able to set it up using a
ramdisk, you haven't enough RAM for that and from what you've said the
machine won't take any more RAM. I actually think that you'd be better
off using this machine to play with various small Linux distros - you
can learn a lot doing this - and not try and use it as a firewall.
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