Linux on the i486

Xlibre, a 32-bit friendly X11/Xorg source base

For people assembling a 32-bit Linux install, we recommend Xlibre for the windowing. It’s a fork of Xorg, and we’ve reached out to their dev mailing list and they seem comfortable keeping 32-bit support alive. Wayland is not inherently 64-bit, but… it has that big corporate sponsorship feel. So we’re going to see how Xlibre works out.

For now, you should build it for yourself. There are quite good instructions from the Xlibre folks at Building-XLibre

You’ll probably miss it on your first pass through their instructions, but when your keyboard and mouse don’t work you can circle back and worry about xf86 input drivers

If you’re on a laptop, you might have your touchpad handled by the mouse driver initially. It’s better than nothing, and you’ll have a usable X11 environment while you search for the right touchpad driver to get a fully civilized X11 experience.