Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

> 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.