11 Apr
2008
11 Apr
'08
9:11 p.m.
Liam Proven wrote:
I got Debian (Sarge, not Etch) running on my Model 80 (even with just
the 12mb of RAM). None of their boot floppies supports MCA so I ended
up doing the install on another machine (cheating, I suppose) and
compiling a custom 2.4 kernel that supports MCA, compiled specifically
for i386 (with 486 emulation). The 486 emulation proved necessary
because a lot of the base utilities aren't compiled for 386 anymore so
they would die with an illegal instruction fault :). (Guess the optimal
distro would be Gentoo so I can make sure everything's compiled for a
bare 386, but I can't imagine how long that would take.) Oh, and I had
to fix the ibmmca SCSI driver so it wouldn't kernel panic on boot.
Whew. This took a long time to get running.
(I tried the latest Slackware first, but they don't even support booting
Anyhow, I'm not sure what the hardware is
that you're messing with there,
but if you want to get some Slackware running on it let me know.
Well, hey, if Slackware is the only modern that still supports MCA, I
might give it a shot. Does it? I don't think modern Debian does...
from floppy anymore :(. I considered digging out my
Slack 3.0 floppy
set but decided to try for something a little more modern.)
I have this running on a 4gb scsi drive (updated the bios on my
controller to get past the 1gb limit -- it's really hard to get a modern
linux distro, compilers, and kernel source on a 1gb disk and still have
room to compile it.). The result is a working Linux, but it's quite
slow. (That's an understatement - it takes 25% of the CPU just to run
'top'.) I'm in the middle of installing gnome on it just to see how long
it takes to start up on a 20Mhz 386 with 12mb of ram. Yes, there's
something horribly, horribly wrong with me. And if you want to torture
it: http://yahozna.dyndns.org:8080/ !
I'd rather run NetBSD on a machine like this, but they don't support the
IBM SCSI controllers at all.
Josh