[Poly-p-ux] Hi all just installed poly-p-ux on a 586
Joseph Mulloy
jdmulloy at gmail.com
Tue Aug 5 11:48:46 EDT 2008
Joseph Mulloy
jdmulloy at gmail.com
On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 5:55 AM, Poly-p man <polypolyman at ibiblio.org> wrote:
> On Tuesday 05 August 2008 01:56:38 am Joseph Mulloy wrote:
> > Hi all I've just installed poly-p-ux on the oldest working machine I
> > have. It's a Gateway G5-233. Here are the specs.
> >
> > 233 MHz Pentium-MMX
> > 32 MB 66 MHz SD-RAM
> > 2564 MB Quantum Fireball HD
>
> nice specs... too bad there's no actual MMX support in poly-p-ux :D
>
I don't really care too much about not having MMX
>
> > I know it's at the upper end of what poly-p-ux is supposed to be for
> > but it runs nice.
>
> This time around, even though it's excruciatingly difficult to get releases
> going (because I have 3 - no, 4 systems I need to build twice each, then
> manually compile and configure everything...), I'm building an i686 version
> to support all the people who think their Pentium 2 box is "old"
>
Why bother with i686? Debian or even Gentoo would work fine on an i686 class
machine, heck the machine I'm using for poly-p-ux could handle debian just
fine, especially since I have more ram lying around that I could use. I've
got two nearly identical i686 class machines if you want testing done. If
you want at some point I could setup ssh access to the machines for you.
>
> 1.0 is delayed, but only because it's hard to release... I'll put more
> effort
> into it probably today and over the next week.
>
> > You may have seen me on the Gentoo Forums as jdmulloy. I thought I'd
> > give this thing a try on real hardware. I've attached some edited init
> > scripts to this email. I made the swap script use /etc/fstab to
> > configure swap instaed of hard coding it into the script. All I needed
> > there was the -a flag for swapon which actually does the work. I also
> > made the modules script loop through a list of modules in
> > /etc/modules.autoload to load kernel modules on boot. Hope you like
> > it.
>
> For swap, I think I tried that on one of my older incarnations, with an
> older
> busybox version - I think swaponoff -a has been added - I'll have to check
> the mailing list.
>
> For modules... that is awesome! I was working on a modules.autoload system
> a
> while back... never got it to work. The most important part is options...
> for
> example, for my 486's network card, I need to load ne with the options
> io=0x280 irq=3. looking at your script, will that work?
>
Try it out, it Should work, it just calls modprobe and then appends whatever
is on the current line of the file. I haven't made it too smart yet, so you
can't do commments, (well it probably won't hurt anything but it will try to
modeporbe your comments).
Just put "ne io=0x280 irq=3" into the file /etc/modules.autoload and it
should work.
>
> Also... with my new, improved init, stop actually gets called... not that
> it
> matters with modules anyway... :D
>
> > Is there anything that needs to be worked on? Any thing you need
> > tested on i586? Can I get a copy of the build environment? Thanks.
>
> Testing would be nice after release... currently I have nothing to test!
>
> The build environment is Buildroot... I'll upload all my config files at
> some
> point.
>
> If you want to be a huge help, get my builds of LILO going - I'm dropping
> grub
> because it's slow :D . Currently, my 486 box (upgraded to it's 850mb hard
> drive) is a complete development environment, so building LILO there wasn't
> an issue... if you could try building for all the archs (or at least static
> for 386), that would help me tons!
>
I could try building for 386 but I don't have any to test on. Is grub really
that slow on older machines?
>
> > It's nice to have this old box doing something useful again. At some
> > point I'm going to see if I can get links to run on it, unless anyone
> > knows of an even smaller browser.
>
> That was one of the packages I was trying to get compiled on the old
> versions... links, lynk, elinks, anything... I had MAJOR trouble with
> that...
>
I tried to compile it statically on my Gentoo laptop and it wouldn't
complie. When I removed the static flag I ran ldd on the binary and it had a
large list of dependencies. It can probably be made to work hardware wise,
but it may need a lot of disk space for all the dependencies. What's the
target disk usage?
>
> At the release of 1.0, I'll upload tarballs of the development environment
> (chroot into it to have fun) for people who care.
>
> > I wrote this email on my Pentium box running poly-p-ux on links
> > running on my server which I'm accessing over ssh.
>
> That's great! Honestly, just having a usable old system (even if it means
> using dropbear to connect to a server) means so much for this project... I
> have my 486 set up such that it's much more comfortable to use it... can't
> wait until I get kdrive and friends up - the system WILL be a beast... I
> know
> it :D
>
> Thanks for showing an interest,
> poly-p man
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>
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