The Insentricity Blog talks about getting a vintage Toshiba T5200 with an 80386 processor running again. The machine has very strict lists of hardware it supports, making upgrades and mods tricky.

 My main reason for getting the Toshiba T5200 was entirely because I wanted to get Linux going on it. I knew this was going to be a challenge for a lot of reasons, not just because the machine is very old and most distros dropped 386 support around two decades ago, and the kernel itself officially dropping support more than a decade ago.

With no working floppy drive I couldn’t just download an old distro and write it floppies to install. Plus, with only 4MB of RAM, it was going to be tough to do much of anything, even if I could get a Linux kernel to boot. Not only that, building an old kernel from source is challenging because modern distros don’t have the required 386 support in their development environments.

Inspired by my project of getting modern Linux running on a 486 a couple of years ago (no longer possible now, 486 support was dropped in Linux 6.0), I wanted to see if I could at least run the most recent version of Linux that had 386 support. While 3.7.10 is supposed to be the last version that still worked on a 386, it’s actually version 3.3.8. However someone took on the task of patching 3.7.10 to make it compile for a 386.

Check out the process used to get Linux to boot and work with 4MB or RAM with exact steps in the post here.