[GRLUG] Old isa motherboard & linux

[Michael Mol]

On Sat, Jul 7, 2012 at 11:12 AM, Cprossu <cprossu at gmail.com> wrote:
> It all depends on what kernel you run and the hardware you get access to,
> how many ISA slots you need, or if heaven-forbid you need EISA or VESA local
> bus.
> If you already have the hardware, post it's specs here, including everything
> you know.
> Slot A Athlon boards (like the MSI MS-6167 for an example) have a couple of
> ISA slots, and a processor new enough to run whatever you need, and there
> are P3 (slot 1 and socket 370) boards like that too.
> If you need 4 or more ISA slots, you'd be looking at a either strange
> hardware and backplanes or real vintage hardware.

I think he already has the hardware, he's happy that it functions, and
he wants to use a modern distro on it.

I think the biggest problems he's going to face are the lack of PCI
and APCI-driven Plug n' Play. ISA PnP existed late in the game, but
it's risky; even Windows 95's "add new hardware" wizard emitted
warnings about some of its probing.


>
> Either way if you plan to use kernel 2.4 there's a lot you can get away
> with, vintage hardware wise. Your requirements will be at least a 486 with
> 72pin simms (because the ram isn't made of unobtainium), and at least 32mb
> of that to do anything, but you'll want at least 128mb.

Be aware, the latest glibc completely stripped out compatibility code
alowing it to work with kernel versions prior to 2.6.x. I've heard
that this is merely an acknowledgement that the compatibility code was
already incomplete or broken, and so its removal was an
acknowledgement that ancient kernels were simply no longer supported.
It's *possible* Ubuntu 12.04 LTS could work, but there almost
certainly won't be any newer Linux distro releases which will.

All current Linux kernels should have no trouble running on an
ISA-based x86 system; current versions of the kernel still support
anything that's "IBM PC Compatible". Which means BIOS-managed
everything.

On the other hand, it's very probable that current Linux distributions
won't be able to fit in the amount of RAM available.

Joseph, how much RAM does this machine have? And of what type?

-- 
:wq