Edit: I am trying to put linux on a compaq armada 1700.

          • azimir@lemmy.ml
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            23 days ago

            There was also a competition (long ago) to see who could build a computer that would successfully boot Windows 95. The goal was to boot the slowest possible time (no arbitrary delays allowed).

            The winner wrote a shim that emulated a floating point unit of the i486 so it would boot on a i386 (no floating point). The result was… booting after many weeks. They won big time.

          • azimir@lemmy.ml
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            23 days ago

            I did some similar stuff on a Raspberry Pi. I had to NFS mount my desktop and make a swapdisk on the NFS mount to have enough RAM to build. It wasn’t fast, but it did eventually work.

    • nyan@sh.itjust.works
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      23 days ago

      I wonder if there’s a Gentoo binpkg host for i486 specifically, since it might almost be practical then. (Or you could set up your own.)