Up until last week I had a 386sx/25 running NetBSD-1.4.1.  I suspect your
biggest problem will be Ram.  I orignally had 4Mb of RAM but that wasn't
enough for the instal disk memory filesystem to fit into memory.  You
could probably install manually, but don't plan on compiling
anything.  After upgrading to 1.4 I found compiling to be extremely slow
(even with 8Mb) - apparently the changes to the compiling tools (increase
the default optimization level, switch to egcs etc..) caused it to use a
lot more memory.

Anyway, if you compile a custom kernel on another machine that is stripped
of everything you don't need - you might be able to get away with 4Mb and
still have some reasonable level of performance.  (My box was doing NAT
and it was plenty fast for that!).  I would suggest you try to put another
4Mb of ram in there though - most boards that old have 8 SIMM slots, and
30-pin 1Mb SIMMS should be easy to find.  

Rick

On Wed, 20 Oct 1999, Brian Stark wrote:

> All,
> 
> I have an old 80386sx system (16Mhz, 4MB RAM, 420MB disk drive) with 
> NetBSD 1.2 installed. 
> 
> Does anyone have a similar system with 1.4.1 installed on it? I thought
> I'd ask here first before I spend/waste any time trying to upgrade it.
> 
> 
> Brian
> 
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