| On one of the forums I regularly visit a lot of people have been questioning the backwards compatability claims of Linux, as I haven't exactly tried a recent distro on ancient hardware I decided to give it a shot. Here is where the fun begins. I went to the closet and pulled from under a pile of old computer parts my old Compudyne 486 DX. Wow, I was tthe head geek on my block back when this thing was new. Anyways I boooted her up and yikes there was trashy old Win 95 staring back at me, heh not for long. First I was going to do a CLI only install, but then what is the point, most all desktops these days are sporting flashy GUI's and this one should be no different. I realized after looking over the internals that this machine would need some modification to do what I asked of it. So, I cheated. I went down to the local used PC parts store and purchased 96M of RAM and a whopping 4G hard disk for this machine. Total cost was $16 dollars. If all this works I think I can live with that. Next was the distro choice. I have disks of Mandrake 9.1, Suse 7.2 (for my nostalgic moments), Debian and Knoppix 3.2. I decided a Debian Sarge system would be the best distro for this particular piece of **** (antiquated hardware). There was a problem though, I have dialup. For anyone who has ever updated a Debian system to Sarge or SID with dialup, congratulations you are truly hardcore. Again I cheated, I opted to do a hard disk install of Knoppix, which is essentially Debian after the install, but is way closer to Sarge than starting from scratch with Woody and apting my way there. So here we are at the point of no return, newly aquired RAM and hard drive installed and inserting the Knoppix disk. To my amazement Knoppix picked up everything except my 1M no name video card. No worries though I'll just use the Vesa driver till I can figure one out that actually works properly. Pretty soon I had completed the HD install and was ready to reboot and see just how well things went. Presto magico, after a few hours of tinkering and configgerin, I have a 486 DX running almost Sarge, that can hold its own with the old 733 Celeron I still play with on occasion. written by James B. |
