Slackware Linux 3.0 on a PCem Pentium 75

Slackware

Established back in 1993, Slackware (The Slackware Linux Project; Wikipedia) is the oldest surviving Linux distribution...

Slackware Linux 3.0 was the first Slackware release to have an official CD-ROM distribution and support installation from CD-ROM. Released in November 1995, the same month as the Pentium Pro. So complete system support is limited to i386, i486 and early Pentium systems.

Fortunately I have a Pentium based system that consists of hardware from this era: tilia. And that machine can be approximated using an Intel 430fx based system in PC emulators such as PCem.

PCem

The IBM PC and compatibles emulator PCem supports a range of PC system, from the original Intel 8088 based IBM PC through to a early 2000s slot 1 based Pentium II system. This includes a couple of systems featuring the Intel 430fx chipset which makes them equivalent to our physical system.

So the target emulated hardware is:

Mainboard	Intel Advanced/ZP (Zappa); Intel Triton 82430FX PCIset aka. 430FX
CPU	Intel Pentium 75
RAM	72 MiB (128 MiB max.)
Floppy	3.5" 2.88MB
Storage	IDE Controller Intel 82371FB aka. PIIX, ATA-2 16 MB/s
	IDE hard disk 2048 GB
	ATAPI CD-ROM drive
Video	S3 Trio64 based VGA
Network	10Mb/s ethernet ISA

Slackware Linux 3.0 on QEMU

Slackware

Established back in 1993, Slackware (The Slackware Linux Project; Wikipedia) is the oldest surviving Linux distribution...

Slackware Linux 3.0 was the first Slackware release to have an official CD-ROM distribution and support installation from CD-ROM. Released in November 1995, the same month as the Pentium Pro, it doesn't have support for a lot of the more modern hardware emulated by QEMU...

QEMU

The default QEMU i386 system emulation ('pc') is based on Intel's "Natoma" (Intel 440FX & PIIX3) chipset for Pentium Pro and Pentium II processors, which was released in 1996 (List of Intel chipsets - Wikipedia):

• Model: "pc" - Intel 440FX & PIIX3 "Natoma"
• CPU: "qemu32" - QEMU Virtual CPU (default)
• RAM: 128 MiB default, 2 GiB max.
• Bus: PCI and ISA
• Storage controller: IDE (PIIX3)
• Network interface: "e1000" - Intel 82540EM Gigabit Ethernet Controller, 1,000 Mb/s ethernet
• Graphics: "std" - Standard VGA (with Bochs VBE)

Since the kernels included with Slackware 3.0 are older than this, they don't recognize the hardware and use generic methods to run on the system. Distributions based on the Linux 2.0 series or later kernels would be a better choice for the 'pc' machine (Linux Version 2.0 | Linux Journal).

Fortunately QEMU has a generic ISA based PC system profile ('isapc') which provides an option that is more in keeping with the hardware available when Slackware 3.0 was released:

• Model: "isapc" - ISA bus PC
• CPU: "486" - Intel i486DX/4
• RAM: 128 MiB default, 2 GiB max.
• Bus: ISA
• Storage controller: IDE
• Network interface: "ne2k_isa" - NE2000 ISA, 10 Mb/s ethernet (IRQ 9, I/O 0x300)
• Graphics: "cirrus" - Cirrus GD-5446 VGA ISA

This isn't ideal, given that PCI based 486 and Pentium based systems existed at the time, but QEMU doesn't provide the appropriate chipsets for those systems, so exploration of those options will have to be on real hardware, or using other emulators (e.g. Bochs, PCem, etc.).