Experimenting with a Pentium 120Mhz and 32MB RAM

V

vmb

I am moving house soon and while clearing out my garage I found an old PC from around 1996 that I had deliberately saved for some purpose that I have long since forgotten. The PC boots into Damn Small Linux (2.4 kernel) and is surprisingly spritely running X-Windows. In fact I was stunned how quick it was. I am thinking about experimenting with this old PC after my house move and I was wondering if there is a published list of minimum system requirements for each version of FreeBSD? I do vaguely remember installing FreeBSD on it long ago but I fancied recreating the look of my first ever purchased UNIX licence (UnixWare 1.0 with Motif) by using FreeBSD and CDE.

I realise a lot of the old graphics card support has recently been dumped from FreeBSD, but I still fancy having a go creating either a 12.x or 11.x custom kernel installation in VESA mode.

I read somewhere recently that is was possible to compile i586 FreeBSD 8.x for a target with less than 32MB of RAM. Does anyone know if this is still possible on 12.x?
 
vmb said:
I was wondering if there is a published list of minimum system requirements for each version of FreeBSD?
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The default 'minimal' CPU that's compiled for is 80486 at the moment, there's some discussions I believe to make it i686 (Pentium class). That's to say, the release images will be built for those, you can still build the entire system for i386 if you really need to.

There aren't really any minimal system requirements, FreeBSD itself will be able to run on very little. Adding things like Xorg however will certainly increase the memory requirements, a modern desktop easily uses a couple of gigabytes of memory.
 
I have two Pentium IIs with 128MB ram in my basement. Both still run FreeBSD 9-RELEASE as of a week or so ago. One had Gnome on it that runs slow but works. It's the Gnome version available back then. The other is strictly terminal run and great for file storage.
 
Thank you both for your replies. I think the minimal RAM requirement is going to bite me with only 32MB in this PC.

I seem to remember installing FreeBSD from floppies on a machine with only 8MB or RAM back in the mid 90's. I have looked for that CD today but I couldn't find it so will download 1.0 from the FTP site.
 
vmb said:
I think the minimal RAM requirement is going to bite me with only 32MB in this PC.
Click to expand...
It's been a few years, but I seem to recall that with some minimal OS installations one must find a temporary way to install. The requirements for intallation are sometimes much higher than for running.
 
You probably can't boot a recent FreeBSD distribution on hardware that old because the kernel as distributed assumes the presence of an APIC (Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller), and ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). And SMP needs an APIC. So you probably need to build a kernel that is NOAPIC, NOSMP, NOACPI to even have a chance.

Here is one approach I tried some time ago: FreeBSD 7, 8, 9, 10 etc. on 486, Pentium, K6, etc.
 
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