The "Tank" Project

Upgrade of an old 486

HOW I DID IT INITIALLY



This page describes the beginning of the process of resurrecting my dusty 486 to life by installing some distribution of Linux on it. The result at the end should be a fully functional Linux box.   I'll describe what I did on the first go around and will later post updates on my updates page as I progress and/or further upgrade it.

I had earlier purchased one of the popular Linux books "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Linux", written by Manuel Alberto Ricart and published by Que, mostly to get a CDROM copy of Caldera's OpenLinux distro that I had heard so much about.   This particular 1998 edition of the book came with version 1.3.

Caldera's distros come with an installer and configurator program called "LISA".   The most recent version, 2.2, which will be a subject of an update to this, introduces the configurator known as "LIZARD".

Since this old machine [like "This Old House"? :-)], doesn't know anything about booting from a CDROM, I naturally had to create a boot disk to get the install going.   If your machine can boot from the CDROM, by all means do so!   I would expect that all of the newer distros on CDROM are bootable and it certainly is a heck of alot faster!   However, for the rest of us... most if not all distros offer the DOS program known as "RAWRITE", that will allow you to create a bootable Linux floppy, complete with kernel.   It basically writes an image to the floppy so that everything is in it's correct place (particularly the info in the floppy's mbr) on the floppy.   To get to RAWRITE on a CDROM as a DOS/MS Windows user, you can simply boot to DOS or Windows (if in Windows, go to a command prompt), insert the distro's CDROM in your drive, then follow the directions in the documentation that came with your distro. For Caldera, RAWRITE was located in the x:\COL\LAUNCH\FLOPPY directory, where x=your CDROM drive letter.   The image that you would need is called  image.144.   Once in the directory, simply type "rawrite" and follow the directions.   Make sure you have a formatted floppy ready and be careful because I've noticed that rawrite may not recognize your formatting, especially with the newer FAT32 format command!   Note that based on what your documentation says, you may want to also create supplemental boot disks as well, which can be done with this same method, but using a different image file.   Note too that a number of distributions offer boot images on the web, so you can pick and choose one that's right for you!

Once the image copying to the floppy is completed, you can simply boot with it to start your install.   Make sure that your CDROM is already in the drive so that you can hurry things along once you get started.

I'm not going to go through a step by step breakdown of the Caldera install but will note that it is fairly automated.   Like most Linux installs, you need to decide whether you want to control every step (usually called "expert mode") or you want the installer to give you the defaults.   It will also ask you what type of install you want, eg., minimal, typical (like a workstation), or server.   In addition, you are usually given the option to manually partition the drive, and will often be given a choice of different partition programs to use to do this, like fdisk (note that if you already have an OS like Windows 9x installed, you will need to do some things beforehand, eg., running a program called "fips" or a 3rd-party partition program like "Partition Magic", that will allow you to make room for a Linux partition, if you haven't already set aside a "blank" partion just for Linux) and you will usually be asked how you want Linux to boot, eg., using LILO (the "Linux Loader") or some other boot manager, either invoking from the master boot record (mbr) or the Linux root partition.   The install will determine your keyboard, mouse, and other devices, like those used for networking, eg. modem and/or ethernet card, and you will usually establish your machine's name and root account's password as a final step.   In the case of Caldera's v1.3, X is configured after the install is completed (which is often a wise move, because it deals with your display and there's nothing worse than misconfiguring your display and being unable to view the rest of an install!).

Once the primary install is completed, you reboot, LISA starts up again, and you can configure your video adapter and monitor for use with an X server.

I was able to get through this process, albeit slowly (this ain't a 333Mhz machine!), login, and start X.   Caldera, like many distros today, default to using the KDE window "environment" (as it is now called).   The choice is up to you which to install later and run, and you'll have plenty of opportunity to download, install, and run your favorite window manager.   With this version of KDE, there is the option to switch to another windows manager, most often fvwm or fvwm2, and many times from those, you can go to Afterstep or WindowMaker.

I'll have to say that with only 8MB RAM, my poor baby struggled with KDE, but it did load.   Most of the slowness came when clicking the KPanel buttons and waiting... waiting for the menu to come up.   But... it was running!   I have seen Windows 95 trying to run on a machine with a similar amount of memory, and I must say that this was quite acceptable!   Note that in the case of 95, you're forced to run in the windows environment whereas with Linux, you can do literally everything you need to without X and a window manager!   That's the beauty of it!

Just out of curiosity, while in KDE, I ran xosview, which gives you a little graphical display of your CPU usage, swap area, and network activity.   With 8MB RAM and a 64MB swap partition configured, I was swapping about 8MB to disk.   This sortof indicated to me that if I wanted to avoid the dreadful swapping while running X, I probabably should have at least 16MB RAM.   And so I decided to try to find those 30-pin SIMMs and upgrade my Tank!   You can see that experience in my updates section!



NOTICE:   "Linux" is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.   "Microsoft","Windows 3.x/9x/NT", "Caldera", "OpenLinux", "Que", "Partition Magic" and any other product/company mentioned on this page or at this site, are trademarks and/or copyrights of their respective companies.

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