FozzTexx Blends the Old and the New by Booting the Latest Linux Kernel on a Classic 486 Desktop
Having picked the machine up from eBay, FozzTexx worked on getting it up and running — but with the most modern Linux kernel possible.
Vintage computing enthusiast Chris "FozzTexx" Osborn has achieved a remarkable blend of the old and the new, bringing a 32-bit 486 desktop back to life by booting the very latest stable Linux kernel — from a floppy disk.
"A couple of weeks ago I spotted this 486 and made a guess of the size based on the size of the 5.25" bay," FozzTexx writes. "It's fairly slim, it has a riser card to turn the cards sideways and the case is shorter than an ISA card, but I don't feel like it's slim enough to call it a pizza box. It's close though!
"The motherboard is a TMC PAT48PG4 and it came with 32MB of RAM (technically 36MB, it had four 30 pin SIMMs in it too) and 4 cards: VGA, Sound Blaster, modem, and multi-function IO. The seller had tested it and was sold as non-working, won't POST, although he said the cards all worked. My ultimate goal is to get a very recent Linux distro and Python 3 installed to a 'large' hard drive, but being that this is a 486 installing a current Linux distro isn't trivial."
"The only Linux distros that still support installing from floppy media are quite dated. Normally I would bypass a floppy install entirely and just boot an older computer via PXE [Pre-Boot Execution] and then install over the network. I thought I could put iPXE on a floppy and stick in an ISA NIC [Network Interface Card] but iPXE just hangs without any error messages right after it's loaded from floppy."
Faced with this system, FozzTexx decided there was only one solution: Compiling the Linux kernel, from source, such that it would fit on a floppy disk, support the 32-bit i386 architecture — not to be confused with the equally 32-bit but incompatible-with-a-486 i686 — and successfully see the 8.45GB hard drive other more contemporaneous operating systems fail to properly detect.
"Next step is to actually get Linux installed to the hard drive," FozzTexx concludes. "I'd rather not roll my own distro but maybe I'll have to. Another possibility is to boot Linux from floppy and then download a kernel and initrd from a current distro and kexec over to it. But that feels to me like reinventing iPXE."
FozzTexx has published a step-by-step guide to building the floppy image and writing it to a physical floppy disk on the Insentricity blog.
