- Julien
Peter Garay wrote:
> There is "linux" for 8086 processor - I came across it an other day but do
> not find the URL. It is semi-working, but with no network it is NOT what
> you want. 640K will not take too far anyway (if works at all).
>
> Use the box to try if you can swap the motherboard (and lean a bit about
> that), you can still (but not for long) get a motherboard that uses
> the same power connector and the same cards as a 286. You can get
> a 2nd hand 486 motherboard for even less. 8 Mbyte will do for
> text, 16 for GUI slow.
>
> For small tasks in text mode I used 386SX-16 with 8Mbytes of RAM for
> long-long time and it was usable. I have picked up motherboards
> like that from the tip...
>
> (from my memories none of the alternatives recomened below would work in
> 640K, but I might be wrong)
>
> From:
>
> The Answer Guy Issue 22
>
> There is a project to produce an 8086 (and thus 286 compatible) subset
> of the Linux kernel (ELK -- embeddable Linux kernel). However it is
> probably not far enough along to be of interest to you. More generally
> we can say that a kernel is not enough -- there would be considerable
> work to porting a large enough set of tools to the subset
> architecture.
>
> Moving back a little bit from Linux specifically we can recommend a
> couple of Unix like OS' that did run on the 286. Of them, only Minix
> is still widely available. It is not free (in the sense of GPL or the
> BSD License) -- but is included with copies of Andrew Tanenbaum's
> seminal text book on _Operating_Systems_Design_and_Implementation_.
> You'll want the 2nd Edition.
>
> The two other implementations of Unix that have run on 286 systems are
> Xenix (originally a Microsoft product then handed off to SCO -- Santa
> Cruz Operations; which I think Microsoft still owns a good chunk of)
> and long since discontinued, and Coherent (by the now defunct Mark
> Williams Company).
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Peter Garay
>
> Any opinions expressed herein are mine and not those of JNA.
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