adivice on 486

[dsolo]

First off let me say I'm completely new to the world of linux so bare with me.

my high-school has a rediculous amount of 486 computers lying around. They are currently running win95, but they take forever to boot and crash if you so much as look at them.

What we want them to do is web-surfing and simple word-processing (preferably compatible w/ word and wordperfect). Anything we used would have to be simple to use because 99% of the people use windows at home and some have never even heard of linux. So basically we want a GUI that take as little resource as possible.

Please advise on, web-browser, word-processing, GUI... everything that we would need to do to get this up and running well

Thanks

[2damncommon]

It will help if you can post some specs on the PCs you are talking about. I would guess that they have little RAM and really small hard drives (possibly MBs rather than GBs).

[dsolo]

I'm not exactly sure of the specs but here's my best guess

486 @ 33Mhz
500+mb HD
16 MB RAM (though it might be 8)

[2damncommon]

Unfortunately, that sounds about right.
You can run text mode stuff all you want on 16MB RAM, but your going to need to know what you are soing to get a graphical desktop going.
And then you would need to watch your install size very closely.
A 2.2x kernel, 3.x version of X rather than 4.x, ICE or Blackbox as window managers, and a large swap might work.
If you can up the RAM you would have better luck. 32-64MB.