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Comment by dm319 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know if it's possible to run a modern distribution on this? I had a bit of difficulty running full-fledged Linux on a Thinkpad X60 due to it being 32bit. Linux mint debian edition came to my rescue, but I wonder if you'd need linux from scratch or something like that.

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Xwoaf-rebuild-4.0 http://pupngo.dk/xwinflpy/xwoaf_rebuild.html

One floppy image, full GUI and tons of applications through busybox. Here is a video showing the full distro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8or3ehc5YDo

On the other hand it's not "modern", 2.2.26 kernel is from 1999

NetBSD should work according to their docs:

https://www.netbsd.org/ports/i386/hardware.html

Or OpenBSD:

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Download

Maybe…? I’m not too familiar with OpenBSD but this page mentions “All CPUs compatible with the Intel Pentium or later”:

https://www.openbsd.org/i386.html

The kernel itself is still fine on 486s and there are a couple of distros that should still technically work. Obviously nothing 'full fledged' is going to fit in the RAM on the thing or run at any sort of reasonable speed.

Gentoo is probably the easiest mainstream distro to get running just because you can fiddle with all the compiler flags and kernel options. A few people have also put together small custom images with modern kernels for this class of hardware.

The problem with Gentoo is that it will take several months to compile everything!

Yeah I would be sure to learn how to use distcc first.

Not quite what you asked, but there was someone who did a "brain transplant" recently: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ibm-thinkpad-701c-receives...

It’s a 486, you will probably be able to run a lightweight Linux distro but it will be sloooooow.

I don’t think most distros compile for i486, minimum is i686 (not too familiar with the jargon though, before my time). Even the kernel itself was going to trash i486 support entirely. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-i486-Linux-Possible-Drop

They'll have to run it with a 2.2 era kernel. Everything after that ran dog slow on these machines.

There is a big slowdown from win98se to win2k, it is the same on Linux with 2.2 kernel and the 2.4. You would best using an older operating system, shutting down most of not all services and connecting through a very strict proxy

Debian still has 32bit x86 binaries: https://www.debian.org/distrib/

32-bit yes. But not 486. That port requires “686” or higher.

https://wiki.debian.org/SupportedArchitectures

Yeah, but it'll probably be more useful running Windows. At least it can play games. :)

I run MX Linux on my T60.

Slackware-current on my ThinkPad R61i

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-current/

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