On Sun, 13 Feb 2000, Jonathan R. Hinds wrote:

> Does it usually take this long to compile a kernel on a 486? Or is
> something horribly wrong with this machine? Did I fry something by running
> that 3.3v DX4 in a 5v socket?
>
> I used to run linux on this machine back when it was a SX25. A kernel
> compile generally took between 45 minutes and an hour.

My 486dx4 compiles a custom kernel in about 30 minutes, generic in
about 45. I don't think you fried the chip, either. I have fried
chips--they smoke, and leave burn scars in the socket, and then the
machine doesn't boot.

Does the hard drive probe as supporting DMA ("grep ^wd
/var/run/dmesg.boog")? If not, if you're stuck at PIO mode 0, say,
swapping is going to be incredibly slow. You might see a huge
performance boost with a different hard drive, or even by fiddling
with the flags for wdc* and wd* in the kernel config file, per the
comments in .../i386/conf/GENERIC.