Help with slackware on a REALLY old system

[Weedman]

oops double post

[Weedman]

thanks

do you know how much space dsl takes up after installing it?

and, can you get a floppy bootdisk to boot the cd (the machine cannot boot from cds and smart boot manager crashes)?


thanks
weed

[Master of Reality]

What is your graphics card? Slackware10.1 should run fine on a 486. Which windowmanager did you install? Oh, and what did you use to configure X?

[Game master pro]

dsl takes up around 150mb after install to hd

to install it, make partitions with cfdisk and run sudo -u root dsl-hdinstall
it uses lilo

[TheBigPhish]

- Cirrus Logic GD5426 (unknown vram, maybe 1 mb)

you should be able to get X working if you use the standard "cirrus" driver and your chip supports 1024k of memory. I think that you might be able to get 800x600 out of that @ 8bit depth (MAYBE 15/16 bpp) for X...but i wouldnt' expect much more.

and considering your extreme lack of horsepower, i would go for a minimalist X windows system....and as few colors as you can tolerate in the depth....

[Weedman]

thanks all of you that helped me with this old pc of mine.

my last question is: should i go for a straight dsl install or a frugal install?

frugal looks harder but supposably more stable...

thanks
weed

[steve_v]

I still have a 486 DX4-120 with 32 meg and slackware 7. it can be done.
same video card too.
What will drive you up the wall is trying to get that cirrus logic video card to work properly...
1MB of vram mapped at 15MB means you're stuck with 8 bit colour unless you have <16MB ram. Catch 22 since X runs like a gut shot pig with only 16MB.
IIRC the only solution is the (old and hard to find) badram kernel patch. tell the kernel not to use 15-16MB so that X can have it for access to the video ram.
BTW, kernel compiles take a while on a 486.

[michael56]

Okay guys, this thread is making me wonder if I should try X on my old machine... it's a 486 SX 25mhz machine with a Kingston Overdrive chip (resulting in 48 bogomips), and 40MB RAM. Currently I run Slackware 10 and apache/php/perl/mysql on it and am comfortable with CLI. Is it really worth the effort to run X on this machine - I always thought it would be too slow compared with CLI -- opinions?

[Weedman]

i couldnt get x up with slackware. then i tried dsl and only just got x up. it was VERY slow.

if you are comfortable with the CLI then i see no need to have x running. it will slow the system to a grinding halt.

with X and apache running at the same time will crash the system (i think).

btw, my old system i tried it on was a 486-DX4 (100mhz), 32 mb ram, 1mb cirrus logic vide card and a troublesome 1 gb hdd (now dec.).

just my 2 cents
weed

[kern]

Okay guys, this thread is making me wonder if I should try X on my old machine... it's a 486 SX 25mhz machine with a Kingston Overdrive chip (resulting in 48 bogomips), and 40MB RAM. Currently I run Slackware 10 and apache/php/perl/mysql on it and am comfortable with CLI. Is it really worth the effort to run X on this machine - I always thought it would be too slow compared with CLI -- opinions?

I'd just chuck that machine in the bin. heh

and hell no to running X on it