Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

baslinux - Re: [BL] Usefull software for BasicLinux?

baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Baslinux mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Usefull software for BasicLinux?
  • Date: Wed, 2 Nov 2005 16:49:25 +0000 (UTC)

interest in the 286 is virtually nil and has been for some time in the
Linux world, and not even the 386 or 486 are considered viable platforms
anymore. At least in the US you can't even _give_ away a 486. Same holds
true for first generation Pentium, and I used to turn up P2's in the
dumpster as well.

Over and out, James

You have a particularly fruitful dumpster. But people have been giving us 300MHz computers for a year now (in the US, a college town). Most recently a working 500MHz.

We gave away a 486 laptop to a kid who wants to set up a nullmodem network with it and are still using another 486 laptop. Is anyone on this list still using a 386 with linux?

I have a 286 lunchbox computer that is nice because the keyboard detaches from it, and it has a TTL plasma screen. But I only use it for email/browsing and DOS is fine for that. Having tried linux on several of our 386 laptops, I can report that it won't even work on some of them that do have 5MB RAM, and you would not want to bother with it on the others in graphical mode, but it is usable in CLI mode with 3MB RAM, just barely. I cut back to 2 VTs to save RAM. You could compile a slightly smaller kernel without PCI support. DOS works better on there and even supports lynx 2.8.5 and lxpic. Linux graphics on there is abysmally slow.




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page