[Coco] Keeping current... ????

[Jim Hickle]

Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:

I don't think a 486 has ever run linux unless it was some variety of 
ucLinux, its missing a memory manager that linux depends on.


...

Having tried linux on an old 25mhz 386, I can testify that it was just as 
painfully slow as it was on my 25mhz 68040 equipt amiga 2000.  And I do 
mean painfull.  Amigados3.9 ran 50x faster very easily.  OTOH I'm not 
sure if it ever found the 68040 and its 64megs of ram, its been so long 
since I tried I don't recall now, so maybe it was trying to run on the 
7mhz 68000 & 4 megs of ram, 2 chip, on the mobo and 2 on the disk 
controller.



I used to run Slackware Linux on a 100 MHz '486 with 16 MB RAM. Then had to move the machine home to run some important, uh... games.  The machine that ran well with Linux really c-r-a-w-l-l-e-d with win98.  The "new" work machine was a 40 MHz '386, 16 MB RAM.  Running our main program, you would type a name to look up then sit back and watch the characters displayed one by one. Performance became acceptable again after I cleaned up the code that dealt with screen displays (all text, no graphics).  

The '386 couldn't keep a PPP connection going very long, though.  Never figured out why, but something was causing the ISP to disconnect after a couple minutes.    Switching to a Pentium machine cured this. 

The ISP said they only allowed you to connect at 14.4 kbps and above.  Actually, you could make a successful PPP connection at 300 baud.  Web browsing was kind of slow, though.

-jim hickle
jlhickle at yahoo.com


 
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