Saturday, October 30, 2004

IBM 486DX2-50, a start

After talking with my housemate yesterday night, I decided to work on my old antique-- IBM 486 machine. Yes, is a IBM 486DX(with floating point unit support!), 2 should be double of 25Mhz, I have a 50Mhz machine! I move it to the office, so I have more resource to update the linux software in it. I open it up, it came with 8M ram, and I have alerady add another 8M earlier. Oh! Good, I have 16M! I install a very old 3Com card in it, and saw the sound card is Aztech's Sound Galaxy, a second hand sound card which I bought for $10, many many years ago. The 1st thing that I want to do is to upgrade the kernel and enable with network support. To make sure the network card is still working, I download a 3Com diaganostic program to test it. Oh! Yes, the network card is using 3c503 driver. Upgrade the kernel to linux-2.4.26 give me some problem. The earlier kernel(2.4.19) seems to be working(without network), but my new kernel show some error:- "Kernel compiled for Pentium+, requires TSC feature!" After search through the web, only find out that kernel version after 2.4.22, TSC is enable by default, even though you choose i386 or i486 cpu. The work around is: $ make oldconfig Kernel is up and ethernet card is working fine, but seems like the sound card is not working properly. It is a sound galaxy, but should be compatible with sound blaster. The error messae shown, the sound card is too old(more than 8 years ago) and it is 8bits, or may be I will upgrade it with another better sound card. I try to compile a kernel without modules(everything into 1 kernel file), seem it will hang. Anyway I already have a working kernel with network support, that will be good.

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