Running NetBSD on a 486

cellsplicer2008

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Running the latest release of NetBSD 9.1 on a vintage Dell Optiplex 486 system from 1995, housing an Intel 486 DX/4-100, 48MB of memory and 9.1GB Quantum Fireball hard disk drive.
Some amount of work was required to cut down the memory footprint and get all of the hardware working. The default GENERIC kernel ships in at over 20MB, leaving not a whole lot left for the user space. With some tweaking I was able to get it down to 2.3MB, keeping all the features I needed.
With some messing around everything is now fully functional, including a vintage XFree86 X server to support the ancient Cirrus Logic VL Bus graphics.

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21 мар 2021

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Комментарии : 18

@ProgressiveTory 3 года назад

NetBSD is universal,highly portable operating system! You can make your old pc alive!

@ItzBreakfast 2 года назад

This is art, beautiful.

@hughlion1817 Год назад

It truly is. Only thing more fun is finding these diamonds in the rough yourself.

@mestrebimbashouse 5 месяцев назад

Here at netbsd, we leave NO computer to die 💪

@tylerdean980 Год назад

Based & UNIXpilled

@snarfusmaximus Месяц назад

I love NetBSD and how well it runs on really low-spec hardware. I recently installed it on a late 80's DEC VAX and, like you, had to cut back on a lot of the startup services. It took 3 hours to generate encryption keys and 5 minutes to establish an ssh connection. I ended up disabling encryption and stuck to telnet. I next plan to put it on a 486DX2-66 based machine I have and probably a Macintosh SE/30.

@xeroxparc 2 года назад

Wow it's running x and has networking too amazing

@cppimmo 3 года назад

Awesome system!

@shaurz Год назад

I have a 486 that I want to install NetBSD on to, but it doesn't have a CD-ROM drive. I'm thinking of installing it in QEMU on to a raw disk images then copy the image to a HDD or CF card.

@MrKsoft 3 месяца назад

I'm trying to replicate this on a similar system (Packard Bell Legend 204CD, Cyrix 5x86-100, Cirrus Logic GD5428). When you say you used the XFree86 packages from 1.5.2, did you just use the baseset tgz's from the 1.5.2 ISO or did you recompile 3.3.6 from source? Using the 1.5.2 baseset tgz's it "mostly" works, I had to symlink a few libraries to get it to load, but ultimately I couldn't get a PS/2 mouse working properly (could only move horizontally or vertically, but not diagonally) and the display gets irreversibly corrupted after exiting X11 or switching to a virtual terminal. So close to perfection, but I'm surprised it worked that much. Curious if you took the same approach or did something more sophisticated to get it going.

@cellsplicer2008 3 месяца назад

Hi @MrKsoft that is pretty much what I did, extract base.tgz, xetc.tgz, comp.tgz and xfont.tgz all of which conveniently extracted to /etc/X11R6 or /usr/bin/X11R6 etc. To run modern apps you need the X packages from the current version. The programs don't seem to be bothered running on the older X server for the most part.

@MrKsoft 3 месяца назад

@@cellsplicer2008 Ok, I was on the right track then, thanks for confirming! I think it's just changes over time causing those minor issues. I started X over telnet so I could see console output while it's running and it looks like for the mouse, it's reporting a ton of "bad event" messages whenever I move the mouse around so it's probably an API change in wsmouse since the old days. (I did get a serial mouse working fine). Not sure about the display corruption, but not a huge issue if I just stay in X. I'll keep playing around with it.

@glassnerves 3 года назад

This is pretty cool!

@SB-rf2ye 2 года назад

please show us **how** you did it.

@negativeflare 2 года назад

ok, so how did you do this?

@nodiuus 3 года назад

YES

@aiisnice1453 2 года назад

Can you compile pypy3 / python for 486 ?

@ZolotoyEkb 3 года назад

Тоже был первый ПК 486DX4-100 с WD100 диском. До сих пор включаю ради old-games. Понимаю, что пришлось "танцевать с бубном", что бы хоть как-то заработало, но: 1.увидев /mnt, не понимаю, чем же NetBSD лучше, широко распостранёных Linux ? 2.не игр, не месенджеров, не HTML5 браузеров, не майнинга. Зачем на старом ПК нужна ОС, отличная от MS(DOS/Win) ? 3.лучше не использовать CRT, так как TFT пощадит здоровье глаз. 4.этот 486+NetBSD похож на удалённый роутер, который есть больше kWh в сутки.