DC Project for 486's?

[shifted]

Hey all.. i have several 486's laying around doing nothing because i don't have a project for them to work on. Any candidate project would need to use less than about 4 mb of ram and not require java. I used to run eccp109, but that projects is complete. Any suggestions?

[rus6]

Why not try neo!

http://www.theneoproject.com/

Ecc2 (news on front page) , doesn't have big platform requirements, but unfortunately it does require MMX which a 486 won't have :(

[shifted]

It seems like a very cool project... i would definitely run that if they had a linux version ready...

[rus6]

If Linux is your bag, why not try

http://www.distributed.net/

There's an OGR project still running, or a beta of RC5-72

http://www.distributed.net/download/prerelease.html

I don't think they take up much resources...

[runestar]

All things considered the 486 is dust... its just really isn't worth the time and energy to run on them. You'd be better off pawning or selling them off and devote the money to some better chips and systems.

Of the various non-profit projects out there, DF is a lot more kind to slower systems. I haven't heard of anybody running any lower than a Pentium on DF though. Supposedly the math routines used aren't available on older chips, but people find DF does run on Pentiums.

Anything older than Pentium, you are more than likely just wasting the electricity. And I wouldn't spend a cent trying to make a 486 viable to run D.C. projects. The 486 is at LEAST 5 generations old, just going by names of the Intel chipsets... that's not including sub-generations within the same chipset.

Pentiums are still scraping by. They still got some usefulness left before they are totally regulated to the dust pile.

Maybe you can donate them to a charity... not going to be playing quake on them, but a little extra RAM and they might make workable word-processors.

Even if you do find something that will run on your old 486s, the amount of time to do any amount of meaningful work is insignficant to the higher electricity bill for you.

Wish we could offer you more than that... but that's the state of computer evolution... Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Best,

RuneStar½

[shifted]

Yeah, i have a Pentium mmx (166), and two Athlon TBirds (1.4 and 1.2) running SoB. The Pentium is still doing useful work (it's a router/server, but i find is still fast enough to crunch numbers). The 486 in question sticks around as a test machine.

Elsewhere, i have a dual P3 (1.0) running Sob, and 20 sparc processors (in various sun hardware) running DF.

I do have a couple old 486's a home that aren't doing anything at the moment. I used to use them to learn and test things like NIS and NFS. Right now, they gather dust though, and was thinking of putting them to work somehow.

[runestar]

Well, if you can salvage the RAM from the other 486s into your test one, might see if you can answer the question of how low can you go with DF? =)

Aside from that, its not worth the effort. I just don't see any project that would be beneficial on running on them. Your T-Birds can run circles around them... going backwards...while the 486 is moving...at its top speed...

TTFN,

RS½

[Tax Bracket]

You could put those 486's on a project which uses time spent rather than transactions or work units finished.

I think fightaidsathome is like this, but I don't know about the java/memory requirements of it.