Old boxes are great for low CPU jobs, as long as you don't take it too far. Eventually, even machines that run fine for their purposes can be a drain on resources. I've been trying to get my girlfriend's dad to retire this box for a while now: exponent:~$ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 cpu : 386 model : unknown vendor_id : unknown stepping : unknown fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no fpu : yes fpu_exception : no cpuid : no wp : no flags : bogomips : 4.39 exponent:~$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 6 6 0 4 0 2 -/+ buffers: 3 3 Swap: 34 2 32 GCC/Glibc/other utilities and libraries are so old on this thing that cross compiling for it is difficult at best, and building large packages directly on it take forever. These days, you can get low end pentium's for cheap and/or free, so there's no real point in keeping 386/486 machines around except for the geek factor of it. On Fri, 3 Oct 2003, Karl Hiramoto wrote:
for the last few years. I've been running a 486SX-25 with 8M RAM and 100M HD here at my work as a print server. I rescued the box from a pile of garbage. I'm running slackware 3.6 with a 2.0.39 kernel though. Just setup samba and lpd to do the printing. The machine has excellent reliability.
These old boxes work fine for print servers, routers, firewalls,
Old machines work great to for automation of real world things. Set a voltage, read a voltage, set bit, clear bit control applications.
here is the box: #df Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on /dev/hda2 97271 83435 8813 90% /
# cat /proc/cpuinfo processor : 0 cpu : 486 model : Cx486 vendor_id : CyrixInstead stepping : unknown, core/bus clock ratio: unknownx fdiv_bug : no hlt_bug : no f00f_bug : no fpu : no fpu_exception : no cpuid : no wp : yes flags : bogomips : 4.71
# free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 6684 6300 384 4500 1960 2200 -/+ buffers/cache: 2140 4544 Swap: 16432 536 15896