Mentalnet GNU/Linux — for legacy i586

About Mentalnet GNU/Linux

A light, TTY-only GNU/Linux distribution for 90s Intel Pentium-class (i586) machines, built with Buildroot 2025.02.17.

Philosophy

The Pentiums of 1994–1997 were sold as the future. Twenty-five-plus years later they're e-waste in attics — not because they can't compute, but because no modern distribution will boot on them anymore. Mentalnet GNU/Linux refuses to leave them behind:

True i586 support — the kernel is built for CONFIG_M586 with CONFIG_X86_GENERIC: no CMOV instructions, so it boots genuine Pentium and Pentium MMX CPUs that crash other modern kernels with invalid opcodes.
Era-appropriate boot options — noapic, acpi=off and hardened i8042 keyboard handling work with 1994–1997 BIOS quirks instead of fighting them.
Servers, not desktops — a TTY-only console is exactly what a DHCP/DNS/lighttpd/dropbear box needs. No X server, no wasted RAM — the whole system is a ~100 MB live CD.
PIIX-era hardware support — ATA/ATAPI CD-ROMs, classic PCI NICs (NE2000-PCI, rtl8139, 3c59x, e100), USB HID/storage and a serial console on COM1.

Run a server on the machines everyone threw away.

What's inside

user@mentalnet:~$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 6.12.104-mentalnet-intel32 (built with Buildroot 2025.02.17)

kernel    : 6.12.x, slimmed i386 config (linux-slim.config)
userland  : BusyBox (GPL-2.0)
boot      : GRUB2 (embedded config + MBR install)
installer : mentalnet-install (on the live CD)
ssh       : dropbear
web       : lighttpd
time sync : chronyd

Wireless, sound, DRM, RAID and PCMCIA are dropped from the kernel config; classic PCI NICs, ATA/ATAPI, USB HID/storage, serial and VGA console all stay.

Release naming

Every codename comes from a Vocaloid, Hatsune Miku or Kasane Teto song. The current release, R1 "FirstStorm", is named after DECO*27's Chūlán ~First Storm~ (初嵐～First Storm～); the initial R1 carried the name Mesmerizer (32ki, with Hatsune Miku & Kasane Teto).

Licensing

Mentalnet GNU/Linux — the scripts, configuration, documentation, website and artwork added on top of Buildroot (board/mentalnet/, logos/, and the modifications made to Buildroot files) — is released under the GNU GPL-3.0-or-later:

Copyright (C) 2026 Mark Robillard Jr (MARKMENTAL)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

The underlying Buildroot tree remains under its original license (GPL-2.0-or-later); no rights are claimed over it. This repository is an overlay meant to be applied on top of a pristine Buildroot 2025.02.17 tree, not a full fork. The OS image produced by the build is an aggregation of many components, each keeping its own license (the Linux kernel is GPL-2.0, BusyBox is GPL-2.0, and so on). The Mentalnet logo (mnlogo.jpg) is part of the project and licensed GPL-3.0-or-later with the rest of it.

The source

user@mentalnet:~$ git remote -v
origin  https://github.com/MARKMENTAL/mentalnet-gnu-linux (GitHub)
mirror  https://mentalnet.xyz/forgejo-v2/markmental/mentalnet-gnu-linux (Forgejo, self-hosted)