Fedora 19 on 386

[John Reiser]

On 04/22/2013 06:36 PM, Felix Miata wrote:
> On 2013-04-22 19:24 (GMT-0400) Fernando Cassia composed:
> 
>> I remember Pentium III machines came from the USB 1.x era, not USB 2.0.
>> So likely your BIOS won't allow you to boot from a USB-anything port
>> using "mass storage devices".
> 
> PIII predates USB2 by only about a year, while USB2 predates P4 by about 7 months. Thus, a PIII system may or may not have USB2 support on the motherboard.
> 
> BIOS boot from USB support came much later, 2004 if Wikipedia is correct.

When the BIOS cannot boot using USB2.0, then in most cases the installer itself
can be booted using a bootstrap procedure.  There are many ways.  If you
can boot any Fedora image (current or old) in Rescue mode, then you can
bootstrap the installer.  Even the Fedora-19-Alpha DVD.iso, truncated to DVD size
via "dd bs=1M count=4482 ...", boots and runs as a Rescue image.  (The squashfs
root is near the beginning of the DVD.iso.)  Unfortunately a default install
of the default Internet Desktop [GNOME] from the truncated image does not
succeed because some required packages are missing.  (The first such package
that is missing from the truncated x86_64 DVD is 'telnet'.  The packages are
on the platter in ascending alphabetical order.)  This could be fixed
by moving all the Language-related files to the high end.  Around 30%
of the full DVD image is support for Languages.

Oh, USB1.1 can be used after bootstrapping the installer!  USB1.1 delivers
1MB/s (12M bit/second raw).  A default install of default graphical Internet
Desktop (GNOME) reads 1.8GB of package data.  Via USB1.1 that takes 1800 seconds,
or 30 minutes.  So installing packages via USB1.1 takes only 1/2 hour longer
than installing via USB2.0.  I did it about a year ago onto a Pentium III.

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