what can i do with a 486?

[Danny Pansters]

On Friday 06 April 2007 17:34:04 you wrote:
> Danny Pansters wrote:
> > 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.
>
> It was running windoze3.1 normally. I doubt about defective RAM.
>
> PCI is definitely unneeded, I only had it there to allow it to boot on a
> new comp. But as I've seen it, it would boot without it: with the message
> 'loading required module pci'. I don't know if it's an EISA or ISA or
> whatever (google images show this and that..), so now I have 'device eisa'
> and 'isa'.
>
> >> Oh and.. should I be using 5.1 over 6.2?
> >
> > 5 is dead. You pretty much must use 6 I think.
>
> floating point emulation... What about it? Is that required? The old proc
> doesnt support it. It was removed since 5.3, I've heard...

Unsure. I'd leave it in.

> > 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.
>
> CPUs, SCSIs removed, faith removed.
> Currently I don't have anything useful on the old board, such as a net
> card, but I'm planning to use it as a router, and I should be able to do
> VPN stuff. So I've left gif and tunnel and ppp. When I do have a NIC, I
> will enable some NIC support.
> I've never used a printer/parallel port or a serial port, but google images
> revealed that I have them, so I've left them there.
> I gather pty is for su's. Why do i need md?

Maybe you dont need it. I thought because you're short on RAM it might be 
something that can be useful. 

> Well, if a standard 6.2 installation doesn't use 4.x or 5.x binaries by
> default, like 3.4 binaries, then I will remove it.
> Removed PS/2 mouse. Included MSDOS for mounting floppies.
> What about apic?

Unsure. Think it may be ditched.

> Current kernel: [ATTACHMENT]. No CPU optimizations used, make.conf:
> [ATTACHMENT]. Result: after the beastie menu, the kernel ticks for a half a
> second, then the computer reboots.
>
>

Hmf. No fun. 

> NEXT: I'm going to compile a bare kernel at some time. And see if it works.

Good luck.

Dan