what can i do with a 486?

[Danny Pansters]

On Friday 06 April 2007 01:23:00 deeptech71 at gmail.com wrote:
> Oliver Fromme wrote:
> > I assume that you don't have enough RAM.  If I remember
> > correctly, your 486 machine only has 8 MB of RAM, which
> > is not enough to load a GENERIC kernel nowadays.  You
> > will have to compile a smaller kernel by removing all
> > things that you don't need.

This was my first thought too; and indeed I think "read" means read preloaded 
image from RAM in this context.

> Making progress. With my custom kernel, the system makes it to the beastie
> menu. After selecting an option, the screen clears (no kernel text
> displayed), after which the 486 is restarted. Works fine on modern computer
> though. What now? [ATTACHMENT] is my kernel config. Something that might be
> needed or is redunant?

Might still be too little (or defect!) RAM. One other idea might be to add isa 
(you have pci and eisa), an old (isa-based?) mobo may need some crufty 
plug-n-pray stuff -- possibly even to get to the HD controller, I'm not sure.

> Oh and.. should I be using 5.1 over 6.2?

5 is dead. You pretty much must use 6 I think.

I don't know if it will matter much in terms of required RAM but there seem to 
be various things you can take out of your kernel config.  I68[5][6]_CPU, all 
scsi support, since you dont have INET6 you can also get rid of gif and 
faith. (I'm assuming that you do have a NIC that you want to load as a module 
and that you want ether and tcp/ip). Get rid of slip, ppp, tunnel unless 
you're going to use dialup. Don't remove loop, random, ether, md, pty. Also, 
some if not all parallel port support can probably be stripped out. 
COMPAT_FREEBSD[4][5] are candidates too, unless you want to run [4][5].x 
binaries.

Good luck,

Dan