On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 07:46:01PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: > Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > > Hello all, > > > > I have a 486DX4-100 with 32 MB ram. I bought an 8 GB drive to put in my > > P-II and it won't boot it so I've put in in the 486 along with a 1 GB > > drive. > > you might want to spend more time on that PII system...
Yeah, I've tried all the BIOS options that I can find, it just doesn't like any drive but the 850 MB it has; it will only take one drive. > > > I'm on dialup and would like to avoid a bad partitioning decision > > requring a whole new install/download cycle (I'm on slow dialup). > > Ouch. > ... > > The box has two drives, both Western Digital. One is 8.1 GB, the other > > is 1.1. I'll be installing 4.1 release then installing the patches and > > following their instructions re rebuilding. > > have you tested that 1G WD drive? Those were curiously cranky, reliable > drives. Yes, that's what I meant to say: some years ago, I became the > proud owner of something like 60 machines with those drives in them, > ranging from never having been powered up (still had factory load on > 'em!) to being very heavily used. The majority did not spin up on their > own, but if you manually "twisted" them, they would fire up and stay > running...until you turned 'em off long enough to cool back down. > Both drives are just fine. > > Here's what I'm thinking: > ...[snip a very functional plan] > > > Do you think that this will give me all the room I need to install and > > keep patched: > > > > full install > > icewm or Xfce > > Konqueror > > on a 486?? > > > Firefox > > on a 486? With 32M RAM??? > 18489 nick 2 0 73M 93M sleep poll 313:36 0.10% firefox-bin > No freaking way. > I don't like running Firefox on my 850MHz laptop. > > > a pdf reader or two (Evince, Kpdf, Xpdf) > > mplayer > > on a 486? > > > mc > > mutt > > vim > > > > Yes, I know that compiles will take forever and a day, but hopefully I > > won't be recompiling much; I need the space in case its required. > > Not just compiles. Most of those apps just won't run on a 486 in > anything more than a "oh, look, it came up!" sort of way. > Before Debian released Etch, this 486 box was running everything but Konquerer and Firefox just fine. Sure, xpdf rendering a page may take 20 seconds or so but everything else was OK. So scratch Konq, Firefox and ofcourse mplayer as runnable apps. > > Are these partitions a good size in the right order or are they any > > suggestions for improvement? > > your (partitioning) plan is not bad, but here are some thoughts: > > Assuming your 1G drive works and you don't bust your knuckles spinning > the thing up manually (don't ask), don't use it on this system, but rather > use it to place all the install files on. That way, you don't have to do > it "right" the first time. Load it up on another machine (or on this > machine before you remove its current OS). Put it in as the secondary > drive on the system, boot off floppy, point the install media to the 1G > drive as the source for the files (it will read FAT and FAT32). This 486 box is my only free box for testing and getting proficient with keeping OpenBSD up-to-date. My Athlon has Etch on it and is my main box; does everything including watching DVDs full-screen. My P-II is my upstairs slim-X client that seems to only take an 850 drive. That leaves my 486 for OBSD testing. > > More reality checks: > 1) Many 486 machines have only one IDE port. This has two. > 2) Many 8G drives don't want to work as a secondary to a 1G drive > (but the 1G drive will probably work fine as a secondary to a 8G) This pair is fine both ways. > 3) IF you get X running on this thing, you will very possibly find that > quits working for 4.2. Many old systems like this will need XF3, as > XF4 and X.org don't support many of the old drivers. XF3 is gone for > 4.2 (and there was much rejoicing). X runs just fine under OBSD: 4.0 under X version 3; 4.1 with Xorg. It has an S3Vision864 with sdac, 1 MB video ram. Does 1024x768x8bit @ 75Hz > 4) At best, this thing will be an X terminal for you, you won't run > many X apps on it. That's all it needs to do. > 5) You probably don't know how to configure an ISA NIC Yes I do. Already done it under OBSD. Its an ne clone that matches the kernel. If it didn't, I've got Absolute OpenBSD and see that the kernel can be tweaked without recompiling it. Besides, I can always learn how to set up a ppp link over a serial cable in OBSD. Did that all the time in Debian before I could afford an NIC. NFS is rather slow and X is impossible. Other than that, it works. > 6) I'm trying to forget how to configure an ISA NIC (damn flashbacks) Perhaps I can help. :) > 7) You don't want to know what I will hopefully be putting out on the > curb for trash day ..er..next week, since I'm spending tonight > answering email. How close to Kingston Ontario are you? Assuming that you're talking about a computer, they should not go in the trash. If nobody wants them they should be recycled. > 8) with 32M RAM, swap will be your friend. You need to get out more > and meet better friends. > The linux kernel will round-robin two or more swap partitions. Will OBSD? That's why my initial plan had a swap partition on both drives. > This is going to be a really frustrating machine to learn OpenBSD on. > Learning almost always requires making "mistakes" (even if completely > intentionally made!). OpenBSD will run on a 486 better than just about > any other OS now, but that's not saying much at all, unfortunately. > Just logging into the machine will be painful. > It ran just fine for me. The _only_ two problems I had: Some incompatibility getting Iceweasel on my Debian box to run via ssh -X on the OBSD box. Konquerer ran just fine. Kpdf did just fine too. Everything non-X was just fine. The other problem was not enough space on 850 MB to try applying the errata patches. The other issue was that under OpenBSD (on the 486 and the P-II with a trident AGP card) was that, e.g. konqueror via SSH would continually redraw the window as it loads a page: flash grey and repain top to bottom, about once every two seconds or so. Rather distracting. Didn't/doesn't do this under Debian Sarge (XF 4) or Etch (Xorg). > I wish there was an economical way to get some of the stuff I toss > out to some of the people in the world who would love to have it. Yeah. I was at the variety store just down the road with my wife looking at their used DVDs for sale. My wife said: we can get that at the library. I reminded here that we had to spend $10 in gas to make that trip and since DVDs have a shorter loan (non-extendable) than books, it costs more to borrow from the library than to buy a DVD. -- Thanks for your ideas. I don't have any other use at this time for the 486 and the P-II with its 850 MB drive is functional (as long as it lasts) as my X terminal with Debian Etch (binary security fixes). Doug.
