Installing Linux On a 386 Laptop

An anonymous reader writes with a link to Hack A Day's step-by-step guide to installing Linux on a 386 laptop, which looks like a nice rainy-day project, as long as you are a stubborn hardware collector. It gets complicated, though, because 386 support has long since disappeared from most mainstream distros, which is why the writer went with Debian 1.3.1.

this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

So it's now considered a "hack" to install software onto a device it was meant to run on?!?!?

Re:this is a hack?

[fragMasterFlash]

Considering the i386SX has a 16 bit data bus and can only address 16MB of memory I'd say this qualifies as a rather sweet hack.

Re:this is a hack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why a hack? Linux has always been able to run on shitty old gear. It was around when said shitty old gear was bleeding edge. Pick an old distro that was designed to run on the gear of the time, and durr, it works.

Re:SX is 100% compatible with DX

[bmo]

An SX chip is merely a 386 without the floating point coprocessor.

SX machines came with an "overdrive chip" socket, which was just a full 386 with math coprocessor. It was a way for Intel to sell 386s that had defective floating point.

When faced with a machine without a math coprocessor, Linux compiled for 386 will do "math coprocessor emulation" if you build it.

http://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/MATH_EMULATION.html [cateee.net]

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BMO