What Linux on a 486DX4 100Mhz?

[roibm]

I got this baby from a friend for free...
32RAM, 800MB HDD, 3COM ISA

I want to put a linux on it just for playing around a little bit and for the sake of the old times(this baby was a king in '94, IBM PC330)

2.2 or 2.4?
debian, redhat, mandrake...?
no x-win, just shell
also, I am not an expert on linux, but I have some experience

thanks for any adivice

 

[Derango]

Redhat and mandrake? On a 486? teehee

You really need to go with somthing like debian or slackware for that type of system. 2.2 or 2.4, either would be fine. You're definitly not getting any kind of speedy GUI on there.

 

[roibm]

I wrote it plain: no x-win
so, there's no GUI to talk about

Also, I can attach it a CD for installation, I have a 24x which I don't use anymore.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

that is more than enough for any distro without X. my personal favorite is debian, it is a little hard to get set up if you're a beginner or not used to doing it, but once its installed, everything else is a breeze

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: roibm
I wrote it plain: no x-win
so, there's no GUI to talk about

Also, I can attach it a CD for installation, I have a 24x which I don't use anymore.

You could install via NFS if you have a network card.
You might also try some of the micro distros. The floppy based stuff.

Also, you can probably strip down even the modern Mandrake or RedHat distros enough to run on that box. Choose the text based installer, and strip out everything you don't need.

 

[Electrode]

I can only recommend Slackware or Debian for it.

Get yourself a copy of mpg123, compile it with heavy optimizations (-O9 -march=i486 -mcpu=i486 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer and so on), put together a little ncurses-based menu system, and you've got yourself a bitchin' MP3 jukebox

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Electrode
I can only recommend Slackware or Debian for it.

Get yourself a copy of mpg123, compile it with heavy optimizations (-O9 -march=i486 -mcpu=i486 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer and so on), put together a little ncurses-based menu system, and you've got yourself a bitchin' MP3 jukebox

I second this

You could install it in your car and put your favorite cds on it. Hook up an LCD and a little keypad and you're set.

 

[roibm]

nah... I have a kenwood mp3 player in my car... so no need for another one.
what I need is just a linux shell box.

I think I will go with Debian... or maybe FreeBSD(through it isn't linux)

 

[MGMorden]

I'd go with Slack or Debian. I know slackware will run on it (I'd had slack running in console mode on an 80mb hard drive with 30mb left to spare ). Heck you might would even be able to slap a VERY minimal X11 setup on there. Run something very light like fvwm or Blackbox and you'd at least be able to have multiple terminal windows on screen at once. You get a main system running elsewhere in the house and you'd have one cool little terminal to access apps remotely from (you could put it somewhere that normal computer would be to likely to encounter an accident. i'm thinking out in the garage where where you could look up thing while working on home projects). The possibilities are endless . . . .

 

[CWoolmer]

Hi,

Put the RAM up to 48 MB, 64 even better and run SuSE Linux 7.3 on it in text mode. Itll run like a dream!

Craig