486 - no go?!

[Kurlon]

I had to pull my trusty 386 out of colo this week due to a price change that was not in my favor after 9 years of service. I've migrated all the services to a Soekris 4801 at my house running Ubuntu Server 10.4.

Meanwhile, I have 4U of overbuilt 386 to find a use for. In it's prior role it ran FreeBSD 8.0 flawlessly, but I can't afford the electric bill to run this thing 24/7 as a server again so I'm aiming for a desktop/workstation setup now. My hope was to install Ubuntu 10.4 on it for giggles. Reading the HCL it looks like I should be good to go:

64MB RAM - Alt Installer
Cx486DRx2-66 - 486 class CPU including the 3 486 specific instructions, good to go
Adaptec 1540CF SCSI - 22GB, plenty of room
Cirrus Logic VGA - Oldie but goodie, I know xorg knows how to deal with it

As I said, I've been running FreeBSD 8 and occasionally -current builds on this box. Imagine my surprise when I had to back down all the way to 6.06 to find a CD that wouldn't kernel panic at boot? Is anyone actually verifying 486 support or is it just assumed to still work 'cause no one's tried to actively remove support?

In any case, my current game plan is to get 6.06 installed, upgrade to 10.4 and then build a custom kernel to match. Plan B is to smear Gentoo onto the box but I'd prefer not to. Are there instructions anywhere for rolling your own alt install cd? I have a 10.4 box idling I can use to build custom packages although all I really need is a tweaked kernel?

[Kurlon]

Are there instructions anywhere for rolling your own alt install cd? I have a 10.4 box idling I can use to build custom packages although all I really need is a tweaked kernel?

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallCDCustomization

That looks simple enough, making a new install CD as we speak...

[Kurlon]

I've got 6.06 installed and updated, tweaking a couple things to get it fully functional when booting on it's own and will then work on updating it.

'course while doing this I found the buried discussion noting 486/586 class cpu support is being dropped in Maverick meaning I'm going to have to downgrade my Soekris 4801 to Lucid... man did I pick a lousy time to move away from FreeBSD.

[chrisinspace]

I'm not 100% on this, but I think the latest version of Debian may run on a 486. That would give you a similar experience to Ubuntu if you wanted a different option.

[Kurlon]

Worst case I go gentoo or back to FreeBSD as I'm familiar with both. My main goal in using Ubuntu is sticking with what we're using at work: We used to be a FreeBSD house, now we're moving to Ubuntu so I've been migrating all my play/experiment boxes to match to get comfy with it. So far it's been an enjoyable transition other than my 486 fighting it (But that's to be expected) and finding out that my Soekris box is going to be left for dead without a big announcement of the change anywhere.

Oh well. How hard is it to maintain a port off the main Ubuntu tree ala the now community supported PPC edition? A '386 fanboi' port if you will for those of us to stubborn to buy new toys. :D I know the LTSP crew are going to be hit by that change as well, they might have some interest such a port?

[chrisinspace]

Ubuntu is based off of Debian (http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntu-and-debian), so it would give you a similar experience. I have a Debian server, but primarily use Ubuntu on my client machines. A few of the packages are different, but the key elements are used in both systems.

[Kurlon]

My box officially rejected linux last night: The power supply died on shutdown. I had just finished tweaking 6.06 to boot cleanly on it's own with network support and powered off to remove my IDE CDROM I had been using to bootstrap from so I could button the case back up. When I went to power back up, nothing. I've verified the power switch is good as is the fuse in the power supply and that it's getting clean AC.

I don't remember the last time I had a spare AT power supply kicking around, and the only ATX I have is an EPS12v unit so I can't adapt it (Missing -12v rail). Hopefully the motherboard didn't fry as well.

[Kurlon]

And as I suspected, the motherboard fried as well. So much for this project.