Installing Linux on a 386 Compaq...

[habitual]

hi everyone...

i'm not totally new to the world of computers, but i'm pretty much a dunce. i just inherited four old computers from my dad's office and i wanted to start getting into linux. the best system i have to learn it on (besides this one, which i'm not gonna put it on) is a 386 Compaq, 338 meg hd, 16 megs of RAM.

any suggestions on what i am capable of doing with this hunk of poop? i would greatly appreciate any help or links to info about this sort of thing.

thanks! :)
zack

[Strike]

um, I wouldn't expect much out of it. You can play around with the command line and learn how things work and all. But as far as doing anything serious with it ... I wouldn't. Software compiles on that thing would be annoyingly slow.

You could play Nethack on it just fine :)

[bdg1983]

There are some specialty distros that will run on hardware such as yours. Not sure of their names right now.

Also try the 'How I did it' forum as some of our members have posted how-to's on the subject.

[irlandes]

Originally posted by mdwatts the 3rd:
<STRONG>There are some specialty distros that will run on hardware such as yours. Not sure of their names right now.

Also try the 'How I did it' forum as some of our members have posted how-to's on the subject.</STRONG>
http://www.ibiblio.org/vectorlinux/

Though I have not personally tried it. Do let us know if you try it, how it works. It says it's only 250MB, with several goodies.

I once put in a very early version of Caldera, into a 486 with 210 MB Hd, and it actually worked, though KDE was slower than molasses. I even got it to dial my internet service, and try to talk to it, but it wouldn't complete the log in series. It was part of a book from Sam's Club about 2 years ago. A real good trained. But, I am not sure it would work on a 386, and Vector says theirs will.

[stepdad]

You might want to do some research into SMP, or Symmetric Multi-Processor. Linux would allow you to network those older machines together and actually have them perform in conjunction with one another to drastically improve your computing power.

Here's a helpful link to get you started:

Linux Parrallel Processing How-To (http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Parallel-Processing-HOWTO.html)

[sincka]

I wish I had something similar to that :P

No seriously... all I would put on it would be a few compilers + vim and boom :)