which Linux distro would run on a 486 or a pentium 200 (even with MMX)

Seneca seneca-cunningham-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Mon Nov 22 04:25:48 UTC 2004


On Sun, Nov 21, 2004 at 11:00:55PM -0500, Jing Su wrote:
> > X or by the kernel framebuffer drivers (the vesafb driver is for
> > VESA 2.0), but it may be possible to get them to pretend to be VESA 2.0
> > with a little help from DOS at the cost of about 1MB RAM.
> 
> I've heard of this trick, but never been able to find a reference to how
> it's done.  Got a pointer?

I've done it with a 2.6 kernel.  If I recall everything correctly,

On compile machine (or target before DOS stuff):
 0) configure the kernel to use vesafb
 1) compile kernel

On target machine:
 0) Install DOS (I have it in a small FAT16 hda1 at the beginning of the
    drive) and get system to boot that partion
 1) Copy loadlin, kernel (modules can be on /), and driver into partiton
    - for the driver, I use UNIVBE 6.7[0]
 2) Configure and load driver
    - run the program, follow instructions
 3) Use loadlin to start linux, including where to find root
 4) If framebuffer works, write autoexec.bat[1] (with CRLF termination)
    that loads the driver and runs loadlin.

[0] <http://www.scitechsoft.com/ftp/sdd/univbe67.exe>, free as in beer
[1] My autoexec.bat:
    c:
    c:\univbe\univbe
    loadlin bzImage boot=03:01 root=03:08 ro vga=0x311

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Seneca
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