13 Oct
2002
13 Oct
'02
11:38 p.m.
On Mon, 14 Oct 2002, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
Hrm, this is getting a little OT isn't it?
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).
I have 486 boxen running both 2.2 and 2.4 kernels, which seem to work much
more efficiently than the ancient 2.0 kernels. As far as distributions go,
Debian seems to be better suited for installs on small hard drives, but I
managed an install of RedHat on a 120MB drive once (and I swore I'd never
do it again).
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).
The 2.2 and 2.4 Linux kernels support IRQ sharing, so it should work "OK"
so long as you don't attempt to run the shared ports at very high baud
rates.
But since I obtained a Cyclades serial board, I
haven't had to deal with
the stock serial ports 8-)
I have to agree, intelligent serial cards really help. I use a Digi in one
of my systems.
-Toth