Small Distros

[Shadoglare]

Are there any tiny distros that are kept up to date?
I'm looking for something that will run, including X, on my 486/25 w/4MB ram.
Ideas?
Oh, and a 120MB hard drive. I've had an old version of Debian running on it before but couldn't get X going.
And no CDROM drive - install by floppy only.

[ 12 November 2001: Message edited by: Shadoglare ]

[thedexman]

What for? If you can get 4 more megs of ram in there you should be fine.

This sounds like a candidate for a network install though; no way do you want to install Linux from floppies. Trust me, I have been there, it's not fun. A "floppy distro" may work, but you really need some more RAM in there I think.

There is a 4MB laptop HOWTO out there on linuxdoc.org.

Try, http://www.superant.com/cgi-bin/smalllinux.pl?Small_Linux

[Dark Ninja]

Damn. How old is that system? That sounds like one of the computers I have sitting around somewhere, kind of doing nothing...


Dark Ninja

[Mr Myaghi]

There is alot of use in old computers. For example if you need an internet router (for example adsl) you can take an old computer (even a 386, 286). Put in two cheap network cards and a floppy linux. You don't need a harddrive, screen or keyboard. That's what I call a cheap router!!!

[thedexman]

A 486 or 386 is perfect for this app, but 4MB of ram is a little low, and anybody should be able to find an extra 4MB. Good luck getting linux on a 286. If you are using this as a router, make sure you get good NICs, as they will make a big impact of the performance of one of these machines.

[Shadoglare]

I'm not sure how old it is, I picked it up for like $30 on Ebay last year. It runs Windows 3.1 fairly well, will technically run Windows 95 but takes 10 minutes to process every click, and is not bad at CLI linux as long as you don't ask it to do something like compile a program. It's basically just a toy, but I'm curious how much I can get it to do. Earlier today I found a linux distro that includes X and fits on 2 floppies - but it wouldn't run without a math coprocessor. I also noticed that debian is still released their base system on floppy - it's up to 14 floppies now (the version I had was ten).
I also found one that looked promising called "Small Linux" but for the life of me I can't get rawrite to write the disk images.
BTW about the memory, it's highly proprietary, and it's CompuAdd (out of business years ago) so a 4MB memory upgrade now costs more than I paid for the whole laptop.

[thedexman]

Thats too bad. It might make a cheap firewall or something. I would play around and see what kind of performance you can get through it.

[Shadoglare]

Well here's what I'm gonna try:
I downloaded the lastest diskette version of Debian last night - I'll install a base image from floppies (hoping that the kernel hasn't grown to nasty proportions since the last version I've tried) and then they have .deb packages for individual components of XF86 and a description of which ones you need for a minimum install.
We'll see how it goes.

[ph34r]

The 4mb laptop howto may be of use... Helped me get Slack 8 (no X) going on a similarly wimpy machine... check for my user name in hte "how i did it" forum too under "486 torture".

[Shadoglare]

Welp, the newer Debian won't install. That sucks.

[TCaptain70]

If you have access to a zip drive, Peanut linux works ok...its slackware based but the install isn't too bad.

Ph34r: I was looking for "486 torture" in how you did it and the search is coming up empty. I'd be very interested in how you installed slack 8 from floppies...I have 8 on CD and I'd love to get it on my old p133 with no CDROM and no network (PCMCIA ports are defective it seems).