Linux on a 486????

[newbie_matt]

I have an extra old Packard Bell sitting in my room with;

An Intel 486sx 33 MHz processor
16 MB of Ram
An on board video card with probably less than a Meg of video ram.
An ISA 33.6 k modem
An ISA SoundBlaster 16 board
A 2x cd-rom drive
A regular floppy drive
And a nice 7 gig hard drive
With um 4 partitions (maybe more) of about 2 gigs each... remember now that it had to do that because win 95 can't handle over a certain amount of space on each partition.. And all of the partitions are in FAT 16.

I have Windows 95 (probably one of the really early releases) on the c: drive. All other partitions are just storing extra stuff partition c: didn't have room for.

What I want to do is to dual boot Win 95 and any version of Linux that will run on it. My question for you is;

1.Do you think it is possible to run any dist. of Linux on this old PC?

2.If yes, where could I download it? (Website, name of dist.)

3.Could I allow Linux one of the partitions for example partition E: and not have any problems with any other partitions? (Still allow the other partitions to use FAT 16 and just the Linux partition to use its own format)

Note: I already have Corel and Mandrake but I think the requirements are too much for the old PC.

[Antho]

try any one of the mini-distros out there, I like mulinux (version 11r12 "woland")http://sunsite.dk/mulinux/

[Pakrat]

I wouldn't keep big drives in that machine unless you are going to run a file server...You could send them to... ahhh, me!

Mini Distros here: http://www.linuxstart.com/distributions/mini/index.html

[compunuts]

The full blown distro with no GUI would also do it. If fact, it will be great to do so for testing machine such as web serving, FTP or music server (mp3?). With GUI, it would as well be a slow crawler but if you install small window manager such as fvwm or icebox then it wouldn't be that bad.
If you have fast connection, I'd recommand using Debian (http://www.debian.org) as a router for this box to the rest of the house but any distro would do it.

Red Hat (http://www.redhat.com)
Mandrake (http://www.mandrakesoft.com)
SuSE (http://www.suse.com)
SlackWare (http://www.slackware.com)

[sans-hubris]

Many of the more popular distros like Mandrake, Red Hat, and SuSe don't work well on anything less than a 586 because they have so much on top of them. Debian, Slackware, or one of the mini-distros (like Peanut Linux) are usually used for such low-end machines. In fact, Debian even has support for machines with less than 4 mb of memory!

[newbie_matt]

Thanks for the help.

Lots of Mini-Linux distros to play with :)

Does installing linux with out a GUI make it difficult to use?

[Antho]

It depends on what you mean by difficult, if your new to linux and actually want to LEARN linux don't use a GUI. If you just want to get some work done with a minimum of knowledge then install KDE (my fav) or Gnome. Keep in mind that to a person accustomed to Windows, the linux GUI's may seem a tad alien, on the other hand, they ARE somewhat intuitive and with a little exploration, you can get real handy real quick. Just my 2 red-cents.

[newbie_matt]

Thanks, I have Corel and Mandrake on Cd, which should I use to do the non-GUI install? How do I start the install in Non-Gui mode? Or should I go and download Debian or another distro?