Scouring eBay late at night rarely leads to good decisions, but sometimes you hit gold. I managed to snag a rare “486-JA” i486DX motherboard with 8MB RAM, shipped all the way from Ukraine. These boards have become almost impossible to find outside the usual recycled junk, and, apparently, the last surviving examples now come with warzone shipping rates attached (joke).
I also purchased a Trident TVGA-8900CL which I'll get working soon enough. For now, onboard VGA works just fine. I've tuned the SnackLinux kernel config to suit 486-era settings and configs, allowing it run with 4MB RAM minimum. Kernel 4.4 is sounds old considering we're at Linux 6.15 as of writing, but it wasn't worth the trouble using any 5.x LTS kernel. In fact, when using the same kernel config with Linux 5.4, the output kernel increased ~500KB in size!
While I'm not concerned with disk size (IDE to CF adapter), any increase in kernel size is important if our systems only have 4-8MB of RAM.
Pro tip:
Ebay supports searching with binary operators. I was able to weed through all the crap with:
(motherboard,cpu) +(386,486,Dx,Sx) +(mhz,10mhz,16mhz,20mhz,25mhz,33mhz,40mhz,50mhz,66mhz) -gigahertz -USB -Core -DDR -LGA -"socket 5" -"socket 7" -370 -ghz -mmx -PentiumII -PentiumIIIand something a bit looser:
(motherboard,cpu) +(386,486) +(mhz,10mhz,16mhz,20mhz,25mhz,33mhz) -gigahertz -USB -DDR -"socket 5" -"socket 7" -370
I’ll post benchmarks and more details soon. For now, I’ll just say: seeing SnackLinux on a real 486DX after all these years feels pretty great.
