What distro for a 486?

[incom]

I have a intel 486 20mhz with two 125mb hdd's and 8mb of 30pin ram, what would be a good distro of linux for this type of computer, if there even are any? One of my Hdd's has win 3.1 and a bunch of old dos games, and the other one is sitting empty.

[Craig McPherson]

Debian.

[NGene]

Slackware wouldn't be too bad, either.

[evil_roy]

Me = debian fan

Me = unable to find current debian install for any machine with less than 12 meg of RAM.

Maybe debian is not the best bet in this case.

Hopefully I will stand corrected and learn something.

[FoBoT]

Originally posted by evil_roy:
Me = debian fan

Me = unable to find current debian install for any machine with less than 12 meg of RAM.

Maybe debian is not the best bet in this case.

Hopefully I will stand corrected and learn something.


for newbie, evil_roy is right, you would do best to add 4-8 mb of ram (see hardware trading forum, there is some 72pin ram available now i think) and then load debian

there are some posts on the forums about loading debian with 8mb of ram, it can be done, but you have to use some advanced trickery (see ph34r's post below-ramdisk). if you are a pc heavy, then check the forums for those posts, otherwise go for more ram, or try some thing like www.freesco.org (http://www.freesco.org) to use that box for a router


[This message has been edited by FoBoT (edited 23 January 2001).]

[ph34r]

While neither Debian or Slack officially support an install on 12mb or less, they can actually run on as little as 4mb - its just that the install uses a ramdisk for the root filesystem while you install.

Check my post over in "How I did it" for details on putting Slack 7.1 on a 486sx33 with 4mb ram.