13 Oct
2002
13 Oct
'02
11:22 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Scarletdown once stated:
The system thus far will consist of a 486/DX-33 in a MB with 8 16-BIT
ISA slots and 8 MB of RAM, VGA adapter, 16 bit IO card with one
floppy controller, one IDE controller, 2 serial ports, and 1 parallel
port, a 2nd IO card with 2 serial and 1 parallel port, then an
Ethernet adapter and a 3270 adapter (don't have an ISA Token Ring
card yet), 3.5" and 5.25" floppies, and dual IDE hard drives (43MB
and 84MB respectively). If I end up going with FreeDOS instead of
MINIX, the EtherLink II will be replaced with either an EtherLink III
or EtherExpress and the II will be used in the PS/2 Model 30, since
its slots are all 8 bit ISA.
Hmmm, Linux 2.0 will run fine on such a system, although getting it
installed (personally I use RedHat 5.2) is a bit tricky; I did get it
installed on a laptop with 120M harddrive and 4M RAM (although it took the
better part of a day and wasn't for the feight of heart---details if anyone
wants them).
The reason this system will have four COM ports is
because in
addition to serving as the console for the Cromemco System Two, she
will also be the bridge between our various other classics (TI-99/4a,
Apple II systems of various models, TRS-80s, KayPros, etc) and the
LAN, as those old beasts don't have Ethernet capability and will
connect via serial connection.
I don't think you'll be able to run all four serial ports at the same
time; that is, if they share IRQs you probably won't be able to. I was able
to shoehorn in four on my main Linux system, but I had to give each one its
own IRQ, and modify the serial driver (that was easier for me than
attempting to dig up the required kernel command line arguments).
But since I obtained a Cyclades serial board, I haven't had to deal with
the stock serial ports 8-)
-spc (Wouldn't run anything higher than 2.0 on a 486 though ... )