[Gllug] Linux for old 486

[Jason Clifford]

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003, Alain Williams wrote:

> If you remember the really old installs, you needed to spend 1/2 hour trying to figure
> which boot floppy image to use -- there were lots of different ones, each dealing with
> a different set of hardware. The current install kernels seem to have much more stuff
> nailed in and so you (generally) only have one - or perhaps 2 if you have a network install.

4 mainstream ones with Debian and, even worse, if you want support for 
hardware RAID you have to hunt for a custom one out in the internet wilds.

> Playing module shuffling off floppy to try to find the right driver for your hard disk/
> network card/... is painful and probably why it is no longer supported.

I had two installs in the last fortnight for clients that I had to abort 
from Debian and put RH onto where the servers had hardware RAID.

In each case I could, and did, have a separate floppy with modules on it 
which enabled me to install the necessary base to have a core system on 
disk yet I couldn't boot the system as the installer did not install a 
kernel with support for the controller.

If I'd had time I could have sorted it out manually however I was at a 
client site and had to make the servers useful boxes rather than just 
demos of how to deal with a broken installer.

RH's installer is very good on this front and has been for a long time (I 
derived Definite Linux from Red Hat and adding support for extra hardware 
was relatively easy) however it now requires a lot of RAM to work at all.

It's rare to find a box with less than 16MB of RAM that you'd want to 
install Linux on these days so I guess it's a fairly academic discussion.

Jason Clifford
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