Anyone using an Intel AboveBoard MC on a Model 80?

[Josh Dersch]

Liam Proven wrote:
>   
>> Anyhow,  I'm not sure what the hardware is that you're messing with there,
>>  but if you want to get some Slackware running on it let me know.
>>     
>
> Well, hey, if Slackware is the only modern that still supports MCA, I
> might give it a shot. Does it? I don't think modern Debian does...
>
>
>   
I got Debian (Sarge, not Etch) running on my Model 80 (even with just 
the 12mb of RAM).  None of their boot floppies supports MCA so I ended 
up doing the install on another machine (cheating, I suppose) and 
compiling a custom 2.4 kernel that supports MCA, compiled specifically 
for i386 (with 486 emulation).  The 486 emulation proved necessary 
because a lot of the base utilities aren't compiled for 386 anymore so 
they would die with an illegal instruction fault :).  (Guess the optimal 
distro would be Gentoo so I can make sure everything's compiled for a 
bare 386, but I can't imagine how long that would take.)  Oh, and I had 
to fix the ibmmca SCSI driver so it wouldn't kernel panic on boot.  
Whew.  This took a long time to get running.

(I tried the latest Slackware first, but they don't even support booting 
from floppy anymore :(.  I considered digging out my Slack 3.0 floppy 
set but decided to try for something a little more modern.)

I have this running on a 4gb scsi drive (updated the bios on my 
controller to get past the 1gb limit -- it's really hard to get a modern 
linux distro, compilers, and kernel source on a 1gb disk and still have 
room to compile it.).  The result is a working Linux, but it's quite 
slow.  (That's an understatement - it takes 25% of the CPU just to run 
'top'.) I'm in the middle of installing gnome on it just to see how long 
it takes to start up on a 20Mhz 386 with 12mb of ram.  Yes, there's 
something horribly, horribly wrong with me.  And if you want to torture 
it: http://yahozna.dyndns.org:8080/ !

I'd rather run NetBSD on a machine like this, but they don't support the 
IBM SCSI controllers at all.

Josh