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Antique Distros? 96

Posted by Cliff from the linux-for-older-machines dept.
An anonymous reader asks: "I've got an old 486 that isn't doing anything (it has RedHat 6.2 on it and even that barely works), and I have been considering installing an even older distribution to make it more usable. I'm looking for something I can download still, has a good bit of programs, has X, and is still a relatively reasonable download for a 56K modem. I would like to download the distro with my new computer, then burn a CD or do something like that to install it on my old computer. The computer is a 486 at 33Mhz with 16MB RAM and a 1.5GB HDD. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated."
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Antique Distros? More

Antique Distros?

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  • Best idea... (Score:3, Informative)

    by ActiveSX ( 301342 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:21PM (#4702524) Homepage
    Your best bet is to roll your own, following the instructions at Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org]. It takes some time, but you can squeeze every bit of performance out of that machine that way.
    • Doing LFS is a _very_bad_ idea, unless he's got a faster, more modern machine to do the compiling on. Doing kernel/X/libc/etc compiles on a 486 w/ 16MB of ram is not something to be undertaken lightly.
      • I would like to download the distro with my new computer, then burn a CD or do something like that to install it on my old computer.

        Don't worry, he does.

  • Early Slackware (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:22PM (#4702528)
    Would be your best bet. I've run it on just such a system. Can you say "recompile the kernel" I knew you could.

    • Re:Early Slackware (Score:3, Informative)

      by Pyromage ( 19360 )
      Why old? That's a waste: I have an old 486DX50mhz running slack 8.1 beautifully.

      • Re:Early Slackware (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I'll concur on this. My office's main network server is a P-60 with 16MB ram, and it runs an old slackware (4 I think, but I've upgraded it myself so much over the years). It runs like a charm.

        I have another server that's even worse, a 486-dx2-66 with 16MB ram. I was having trouble compiling a current package with the ancient gcc, and rather than attempt to rebuild gcc I tried out newer distributions with it.

        Red Hat 7.0 was so unbelievably slow getting booted and running after installation it was terrible. I then got out my heretofore-unused Slackware 7.1 disks and installed that as a test... it ran JUST AS FAST as the original installation of slackware did, despite being like five years newer.

        (This was a few months ago, so no I didn't have current versions of slackware and redhat to test, and didn't feel like spending a week downloading the iso's, especially since slackware worked for me).

        So my vote: slackware. Seriously.

      • Re:Early Slackware (Score:3, Interesting)

        by daaan ( 578093 )
        I agree with the slackware 8.1 comment. I have a 486dx-66 with 16MB that sits in my closet and acts as a broadband router for the test of the network. It's an old DEC machine that runs beautifully, with i think 2 350MB harddisks in it.

        The nice thing about slackware, not doing a lot of fancy hardware detection is that i was able to remove those disks, put them in a faster machine, install everything, recompile a kernel specifically for the 486, slap the disks back into the old cae and away I want. took less than an hour to get everything set up...
        • I can agree with the hardware detection. I have a machine doing router/firewall/server work for my home network, its running Slack 3.4, with a 2.2.10 kernel.
          It is on its 3rd motherboard, although the first was the closest to a 486 (a MediaGX with reported in /proc/cpuinfo as a 486 and running at 180Mhz, its bogomips was almost 3x the 66Mhz 486 sitting next to it(also slack 3.4, 2.2.12 kernel)).
          I also had a server we used for yearbook which went from a 486 33Mhz 8MB and a 4GB drive to a Pentium 90 128 MB with the 4GB IDE, 2.0 GB SCSI, DAT, then added a 4.3 GB SCSI, another processor, swapped processors with adapter boards (swapped the 2 90s out for 2 200Mhz MMX down clocked to 180, bogomips/processor went up 10x...), another 4GB IDE drive. I will say that thing was a monster, but it did last for over 6 months (summer!) w/o a reboot, better than the school's NT servers which I think had a high of 1 month.
      • A few months ago, I installed Slack 3.9 on a 12-meg, 386SL/25 laptop. 3.9 was the last to includes a 2.0 kernel and libc5, so I figured it'd be fastest.

        It ran fairly well. No accelerated drivers for X, or anything else other than Windows 3.11, so it lived in text mode.

        It ran surprisingly well. Of course, the 386SL is an odd beast, with on-chip memory and cache controllers -- this was doubtless the source of some improvement in speed over what I expected.

        Some time later, something-or-other trounced the hard drive rather completely, so I installed Slackware 8.1.

        It runs surprisingly well. Some things even seemed to be a touch faster than they were with 3.9.

        Thus, I'd like to submit that -all- versions of Slackware are suitable for old hardware.

    • Yes, I've run such a system too. Find Slackware 3.5 somewhere. But, why the heck do you want to use a 486?

  • Start the flame wars (Score:3, Interesting)

    by noz ( 253073 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:28PM (#4702566)
    I thought that was what Debian [debian.org] 386 (i.e. not x86) was for. :)

  • Um, slackware, I guess, but that's not the problem (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cecil ( 37810 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:31PM (#4702578) Homepage
    What's wrong with an old version of slackware? or heck, even a new version of slackware, I bet.

    I installed slackware on a 486sx laptop with 4MB of RAM and only a floppy drive, (although they've since dispensed with the disksets) and it ran just fine. X was slow, but that's par for the course, deal with it.

    Really, I don't see why the distribution matters as much as the software you're putting on it. I mean, if you install KDE, it's going to be dog-slow. That's KDE. Try installing blackbox or fvwm or even windowmaker: all fairly lightweight-but-usable window managers. Every distro has them (almost).

    It's not a matter of picking an old enough distro, it's a matter of picking your software wisely. No, a "default install" will not cut it. You're going to have to be selective. If you're low on disk space, try nano, vi, jed or jove instead of emacs. as far as X-based edtiors go, you might as well forget about it. On a 486, even kedit is pretty heavyweight.
    • Why bother with X?
      Install lrp or ipcop and use it as a router/firewall, it should be ok for that sort of use.
      It may be ok as a print server for a lan, but I'm not so sure about that - maybe a minimal install would cover it.

      Oh, even though I'm an emacs man (or t.h.e. for some stuff) I really wouldn't install it here, either :-) Small is beautiful here.

  • Try old Debian. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:32PM (#4702583) Journal
    Older Debian Distributions:

    http://archive.debian.org/dists/
  • It runs windows 3.11 and opera 3.62 at very impressive speeds, given its age. It just goes to show how much of an overkill modern CPUs are for most people's needs. My mother does the internet on it: As long as you dont stumble upon a website with lots of flash or pop-ups, even IE5 runs acceptably!
    What I've been thinking, and here's the part that's useful to you, is if it wouldnt be a whole lot faster to just run it as a VNC client and let my speedy box do the actual processing and disk-spinning. I did download the dos VNC client but apparently its for 32-bit dos prompts and not real 16-bit ms-dos?
    I guess I could try my hand at some sort of LFSish setup but I'm still a bit of a n00b :)

  • Don't use old tools (Score:5, Informative)

    by Professor Collins ( 604482 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:37PM (#4702623) Homepage
    By forcing yourself to downgrade to older system software, you are foolishly limiting yourself from running the hundreds of new and useful apps that have been released for Linux lately, most of which depend on the latest versions of the kernel and libc (or binary-compatible substitutes). Not to mention there are hundreds of security holes in old Linux distros that have only been patched in the latest versions of the included software.

    I too faced this dilemma when trying to make use of a batch of 486 machines donated to our computer lab. My solution required a bit of elbow grease, but ensured that my machines both ran acceptably and had the latest and most secure versions of software available to them:

    • I built a Gentoo Linux [gentoo.org] system on the Athlon XP 2000+ machine in the lab, targetting all the software for 486 (gcc -O3 -m486 -march=486 -fomit-frame-pointer -s) and building a very stripped-down 2.4 kernel with only the bare necessities. I also replaced the standard GNU shell tools with BusyBox [lineo.com] and GNU libc with uC-libc. On this fast machine, the compilation cycle didn't take long, and I was able to build and install everything into a temporary /install directory in less than four hours.
    • Once that was done, i tarred up the /install directory I had built and burned it onto an ISO along with a bootimage from tomsrtbt [toms.net] mini-Linux distro.
    • I then booted each 486 machine in turn from the CD, and used a shellscript I had written which created an ext2 partition, formatted it, and untarred the contents of my custom gentoo setup onto the disk, and set up grub to boot into it.
    With all this done, I was able to quickly and easily convert these seemingly worthless 486 machines into reasonable X terminals. Gentoo's e-merge infrastructure ensures that maintenance is easy, and that I have full control over the compilation process. This way, I can tailor every app to get maximum performance out of the limited but still substantial power of the 486 chip.

  • I just did this recently (Score:5, Interesting)

    by benjamindees ( 441808 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:40PM (#4702636) Homepage
    with only 8 megs of RAM. I have finally gotten it to a usable point with FVWM and a custom, pared-down kernel.

    I used Debian Slink, but I have access to a broadband internet connection. The X Configuration was a major pain. You should look into a mini distribution that comes with TinyX or something based on UCLibC if you really want the most bang for your download time. Remember, VesaFB is your friend.

    I'm also looking for a distro specifically for old 486's, but I am yet to find one. I have run across this [qnx.com] commercial OS, though, which is pretty cool.

  • One option (Score:4, Insightful)

    by drdink ( 77 ) <smkelly+slashdot@zombie.org> on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:44PM (#4702663) Homepage
    Assuming you have more than 4 or 8MB of RAM, I would suggest try putting FreeBSD [freebsd.org] on it. You can download the FreeBSD ISOs here [freebsd.org] and if you get all 4 ISOs for FreeBSD 4.7, it will come with packages for a lot of the software you need eliminating more download needs.


    2488MB may seem to be a big download for 56k, but remember that you are getting a fully working system with packages included. It used to be that all us suckers had to download huge stuff on 56k modems.


    (waits to be modded down for mentioning *BSD.)

    • Re:One option (Score:4, Informative)

      by questionlp ( 58365 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @09:03PM (#4702767) Homepage
      You don't have to download all four ISO images, but instead, you can download the mini ISO install image [freebsd.org] for FreeBSD 4.7 and use Ports to download and build the stuff that you need. You can also use CVSup to pull down the sources and enable compression over slower links.

      The only problem is that the installer for the more recent FreeBSD versions require more than 8MB of RAM (12MB is the bare minimum I think). For firewall and/or router purposes, try out ClosedBSD [closedbsd.org] which is based on PicoBSD (which in turn is based on an earlier release of FreeBSD). You can download the ISO from there.

      For even a smaller install, NetBSD might do the trick, as well as OpenBSD.

    • OpenBSD and NetBSD (Score:5, Informative)

      by Ivan Raikov ( 521143 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @09:29PM (#4702911) Homepage
      Assuming you have more than 4 or 8MB of RAM, I would suggest try putting FreeBSD [freebsd.org] on it.

      I'd also suggest trying out OpenBSD; I've been running it on an old ThinkPad wtih 486/25MHz processor and 12 MB of RAM. I can run Emacs 20.x and the OpenSSH server on that machine, and still have about 6 - 8 MB of free RAM. I use it mostly as a type-writer, but GCC 2.95 is perfectly usable on it.

  • One thing to be wary of (Score:4, Informative)

    by Tim_F ( 12524 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @08:46PM (#4702677)
    A lot of older distros (Mandrake and RedHat) will no longer be supported. So be wary if you're going to put this machine on the net. It may be very likely that there are security holes in some of the packages, and your machine could be easily hacked.
  • openbsd. it runs great on my soekris net4501 (486/133 - 64mb - 32mb compact flash disk). you can follow the procedure outlined here [openbsd.org] in the openbsd faq to get up and running on a system with less than 32mb of ram

  • FreeBSD works great (Score:2, Informative)

    by pillohead ( 553676 )
    I have a 486 w/ 16MB of RAM and a 700 MB hard drive that FreeBSD 4.7 happily resides on. I just use NFS to mount my main machine's port tree and have access to all those apps ported to FreeBSD. Sorry I forgot... BSD is dead.
  • Why dont you just install slink, or a minnimal install of Woody, debian is very easy to pare down. I think a decent install w/ X is still around 300-600 megs. And I know it can easily be trimmed further with aptitude.
    • I have a stripped down Debian firewall. Debian is not the easiest to trim down. Some of the dependancies really complicate matters. (ex: Exim depends on openldap, even if you don't need the ldap support.) Not that you can't trim down Debian it just not as easy as starting with a smaller distro to begin with.

      Start with Slackware or better still OpenBSD. OpenBSD is everything you need in a *nix install and nothing more. My old OpenBSD 2.7 is only 320MB with X v3. 70MB of that is additional packages. This mostly default install includes X, gcc, apache, and 15MB of perl. Samba, Vim, and Emacs were installed from packages.

      • Just as a quick followup. A complete base install of OpenBSD 3.2 (all *.tgz, no source) is only about 300MB. The install guide claims that a minimal install would be about 100MB.
  • Switching distros isn't going to help much. A distro is a distro is a distro. The problem is that X has a larger constant overhead than GUIs of the day did -- yank X off the machine and it'll be a decent server.
  • It may be worth looking into getting one of the BSD's. I have NetBSD 1.6 running on a laptop with 64meg of ram and a 233Mhz. It is not to slow. I am using the old X3.3.6 X drivers as X4.x requires more memory.

    You can download NetBSD 1.5.3 base and X or get a cdrom and it may work for you. Use blackbox as the WM or something small (no gnome or kde) and you should be okay. You'll be able to run many apps too. You can use links -gui for a decent gui web browser that does not take up lots of ram or cpu.

  • NetBSD (Score:2, Interesting)

    by beholder77 ( 89716 )
    I have a collection of older machines (see my web page) some of which are quite bit slower than most 486's. I've found that when it comes to memory utilization, and hard drive space requirements, NetBSD is a good contender. You can reduce the memory footprint by recompiling the kernel (just like Linux), and get away with a usable system in 20 megs (without man pages or system source files).

    I'm not trying to disuade you from installing Linux by this comment (I love Debian), just telling you about my OS of choice for older machines.
  • RedHat has ISOs for every version of the distro since 1.0 on their FTP site.

    However, it's likely to get owned pretty fast if you just put a stock, say, RH4.2 machine out in the world. What might not be a bad idea is to take 6.2, compile the latest 2.2 series kernel with no bells and whistles, and minimize the hoggish servers running on the box. It can obviously be made to be much quicker than a standard 6.2 install.

  • I've got a similar box here. Installed RedHat 7.x (7.1 or 2 I think) on it with no problems.

    The best way to approach this is to do a minimal text-mode install, and then slowly add the files you need to make it useable. Yes, you will end up installing some packages you don't need (or can't use!) such as Mesa, but they won't slow you down. If harddrive space is an issue, start paring down such things as documentation: Install a minimal set of man pages and rm -r /usr/doc (or wherever it is all located now).

    Next, make sure you can get X up and running with a light window manager. That rules out KDE, Gnome, and pretty much everything that's been "new" in the past 5 years. When set up right, FVWM can be both fast and functional. Personally, I found Windowmaker a bit too slow for a low-end 486.

    If you can get some more RAM, get it! If not, tweak carefully. Cut everywhere you can to turn off EVERY service that you don't really need. I know, lots will end up getting swapped out, but not all (you don't really need cron, do you?)...

    Also, make the services and programs that you *do* need as light-weight as possible. Limit your fonts and pixmaps in X, use a lightweight terminal (rxvt) instead of xterm, etc. Top (man top) sorting by memory usage is your friend. For software you just can't run on that machine and don't have a viable replacement for, don't forget that you can run them on another machine. Just ssh to it and fire up Mozilla there!

    What you shouldn't waste your time on is custom builds of things. It's not worth it. I've tried. If you know what you're doing, you will save 15k of RAM by custom-building your kernel. It won't be noticably faster, and you'll just be dissapointed. Of course, it is a great learning experience! ;)

  • My votes: Slackware 3.0, or perhaps Red Hat 4.2. (Score:3, Informative)

    by JessLeah ( 625838 ) on Monday November 18, 2002 @11:23PM (#4703381)
    These distros were what I was using years and years hence. I recall running a stripped-down Slack 3.0 on a '386-16 laptop with 4MB of RAM and an 80MB HDD. (No kidding. It was an AT&T Safari-- remember those? If you squinted just right, you could swear the front of the case said "Satan" instead of "Safari". Or maybe that was the demons in my head taunting me. ;) )

    Red Hat 4.2 used to run just dandy on desktops I had with around the level of hardware power you're talking about.

    If you want to be lean and mean, go with Slackware. If you want something a bit more user-friendly/desktop-ish, go with Red Hat. However, I must say that installing Slackware 3.0 was never terribly hard for me. It was the first time I installed Linux, and the whole process went rather smoothly. If you know any existing modern distros well enough, Slack 3 should be a cakewalk for you.

  • LTSP (Score:2, Interesting)

    by JohnFluxx ( 413620 )
    I have some old machines, and I run kde3 on them, with open office and mozilla. How? I actuallly run everything off a main server, and just export the display. My old machines don't have any hard disks, just a floppy disk drive, mobo, video card and ethernet card.
    See ltsp.org for more details.
  • LFS [linuxfromscratch.org] is the way to go to make old hardware new again, IMHO. Hardware is only as old as the software it runs, so going with an antique distro is just make your old computer old again. If you build an LFS machine, you can keep it useful while still keeping current.

    Also, have you thought about a thin client/diskless node setup? is a great example of one of the many type of distros like this... [sourceforge.net]
  • I think everyone is going to say something different about this (depending on their own experience), but overall it all goes down to a couple of importants things:

    1) If you want the best performace with linux, you will propably have to re-compile everything. You can do all this by hand by following the procedures giving by the Linux from Scratch [distrowatch.com] projet. If this is too much for you, you can go with source-type distributions [distrowatch.com].

    2) If you don't want to go down the "compile-for-3-days" path, you can try modern distros of linux [distrowatch.com]or BSD: FreeBSD [freebsd.org], NetBSD [netbsd.org] or OpenBSD [openbsd.org] (there is a debian "port" [debian.org] of netbsd and one of freebsd that *could* make life easier). Most are compiled for i386 and can be used if you...

    3) Carefully choose your applications! Don't use Kde or Gnome unless it has been carefully stripped of all the surplus. Don't use Mozilla, try pheonix instead.

    4) Try it! The best way to know if this is better than that is to try it out.

    If it's still too slow or un-usable for you, you can try to give you computer a specific task... like X-terminal [slashdot.org] or even a router [freesco.org]...

    I did make some old machines working again with these simples guidelines but i think the most important thing is to...

    5)Have fun! I know i did!

  • Although your 486 sounds a lot more powerful than what I have to work with (a 16mhz 486 laptop, 4mb ram), the following worked for me in an analogous, but even more arduous, situation. YMMV.

    1. Get a copy of MS-DOS 6. Yeah yeah, I know. You can substitute another DOS if you know that it'll work with step number
    2. Install a reasonable TCP/IP stack impl with PLIP from simtel.net. Setup for this is extremely tricky and, of course, requires a special cable to talk to your 'main squeeze' linux box, but if you do a lot of filetransfer, you might like this. Alternately, grab a terminal emulator (eg. minicom) and put a getty on /dev/ttyS?, and use sz/rz for filetransfer. In all honesty, this is what I do since I lost my carefully custom-crafted .ini for the plip/tcpip stack. (Note: You *could* do everything by floppy, if you haven't, like myself, long since removed that annoying anachronism from your main machine.)
    3. Install cygwin. Pare it down to give you a basic unix interface: Bash, the commandline utils (awk/sed are a must for me), vim, and what-have-you.
    4. Set your autoexec.bat to launch bash.
    5. Set your cygwin vim's .vimrc to always save with unix fileformat. (:set ff=unix, IIRC). This will save you grief when uploading.
    6. Copy over your usual .bashrc and associated scripts. Might as well be comfortable in your new home.
    7. Voila! It's not linux, but for most of the tasks that you could run on a 4mb 486 you'd be hard-pressed to notice. (How much multitasking are you really going to do in 4mb?) Oh, yeah: You also get to run that copy of Red Baron [mobygames.com] you have kicking about.
  • Why do you think you need to install an "older version" of Linux? Kernels today will likely run faster on that hardware. This isn't Windows or Mac OS or something similar. You're not forced to use the entire operating system, gui and all. Redhat 6.2 will run *fine* on there.

    Redhat 7 will run *fine* on there. Mandrake whatever the hell the version number it is now will run *fine* on there. Just be picky about the software you run. Don't expect to install KDE3 or Gnome and recieve reasonable performance.

    Lord help us from the hordes of folks who know too little to be useful, and just enough to be dangerous (or incredibly annoying).
  • I turned an old 486 with 24MB and a 500MB hard drive into a perfectly acceptable nat router/firewall/traffic shaper/dns cache for a cable modem in my previous house running OpenBSD. It ran really well and after recompiling the kernel it never used more than 14MB at most.

    I am currently staying with friends who also use a 486 to share and firewall their cable modem using the Linux based IPCop [ipcop.org]. Setting up old 486s to do this is more flexible and much cheaper than buying a dedicated hardware router (although they also tend to be a bit noiser).
  • Slackware is where it's at for older machines. I put 7.1 on a 486dx2-50 laptop with 12megs of ram and a 200 mb harddisk. The only thing that was really limiting was such a small disk. Since many older machines may only have floppy drives, Slack really shines becuase of the fact that it supports floppy installs. (I think they may have just recently discontinued this, but I'm pretty sure the fairly modern 7.x Slacks still supported it.) Really the only thing I'd be even semi-worried about on your machine would be the speed of the cpu. You might look into getting a new 486 chip for it (say, off ebay or something; a working 486-dx at 66 to 100 mhz shouldn't cost you more than a buck or two) if your motherboard supports swapping in a higher spec part. (You'd probably be ok with 33, but if you can get 66 or higher for less time and money than a cheeseburger, why not? ;))
  • If you have less than 12 MB RAM (but more than 5), it is easier to start with Debian [debian.org] 2.1 (Slink) as kick-off base and then dist-upgrade to Potato (2.2) or Woody (3.0). You won't have to trick around the memory limitation. Using a PC with less than 8 MB does not really make fun, though.

    If you only have a small harddisc, you should not use TASKSEL, but install a very basic system. AFTER that select the packages you really need. You might run into problems even with the base syetem when using very small (notebook) HDs, i.e. smaller than 200MB.

    I am using Debian on old 386/486/K6's as well as new P3/P4's, so I might be biased...
    ;-)
  • I've personally run slackware on an old 486 box just like the one described for a few years. It just quietly sat in a corner and served up web pages and the like. But yeah, grab slackware 3.3 or 3.4 from their ftp site. It's still free as the day it was produced.

    Besides, slackware is a great tool for learning the innards of linux. It forces you to learn how linux really works.

    ...Bad spellers of the world, untie!
  • Ignore those Slackware comments: It's tricky to install and a monster to download.

    Instead go for Openbsd, which is dead easy to install, secure and perfect for low-end machines.

    If you're dead keen to run Linux, why not go for Basic Linux [ibiblio.org] which I used successfully on a 386 with 8MB.

    Cheers,

    Dirk

  • debian 3.0 (woody) is actually quite easy to pare down for use on older systems, and you benefit by having newer, stabler, more secure versions of any programs you'd like to run ... i've got it on an old 486 here acting as the house firewall, and the total install is somewhere around 121MB, plus swap space ... i took out all the documentation, man pages, the system sources (headers and crap), and any packages i didn't need/want ... it runs a 2.4 kernel and a few services, notably iptables and dhcpd ... doesn't have X, though, which it seems like what you're looking for ... if you want just a decent web browser machine, i'd suggest getting a 2.4 kernel with framebuffer support enabled and running gpm and elinks in the console ... mmm ... text-mode browser with tables and mouse support ...
  • I've had great luck with this distro on old hardware. It's got X, KDE 1, and lot's of neat stuff. It might not be the best, though. You might wat to throw kde 1.1.2 on it, and compile a 2.4 kernel. Don't worry about hard drive space, it's only 1 CD and couldn't fill your drive if you installed everything
  • Here was an article on Slashdot a week or so ago http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/1 1/10/2214253&mode=thread&tid=106 about a small sized Linux using BusyBox and a GLibC compatible library that is pretty small. It installs off 3 floppies. I havnt gotten around to trying BusyBox or the library so I dont know how well X or X apps will run off it, but if you run a smaller desktop like FVWM or BlackBox, it might work with decent performance. Its worth a look into. If worse comes to worse, try an alternative to Linux and run something like FreeBSD or OpenBSD, or even a non-*nix like FreeDOS.
  • If possible, buy a 486 DX2-66 or DX4-100 chip off the internet (dirt cheap and quick, in my experience). Most 486 boxes will work at least 66 or 100 Mhz (without overclocking -- just switching jumpers). At least, this will make the X experience much more practical.
  • A number of early distros can be found on Ibiblio's ftp site [ibiblio.org].

    Or you could get this [kernel.org] just for fun.
  • I believe it may have shown up here on ./

    To quote:
    Hardware is only as old as the software it runs: a modern operating system and up-to-date applications return an older system to productivity. This article provides best practices and step-by-step guidance on how to build a working Linux system on older hardware or on modern hardware with limited memory and storage.

    Check in out here [ibm.com].
  • Probably you will not expect peak performance from that anyway... So here is what I would go for:

    • Linux Kernel 2.2 (with low memory i would recommend 2.2..) or a really stripped-down 2.4 kernel, running a modern distro which is rather slick in itself, like Slackware or Debian. This will help you avoiding numerous security holes in older distros.
    • There has been an article [linuxjournal.com] which focusses on small yet functional destop programs.
    • If you want to go with really stripped-down distros, which are suitable (or optimized) for embedded computers, check this link [linuxdevices.com].
    • I have to agree with some of the other posters that one [freebsd.org] of [netbsd.org] the [openbsd.org] *BSD derivates can be and feel a lot smaller than full-featured, KDE3-based Linux distros...
    • If security is not much of an issue for you, for whatever reason, you might want to go for an outdated Linux distro. Watch out for a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel, and libc5 instead of glibc2/libc6, or you might not gain much from the old stuff... Or even Minix [cs.vu.nl]? VSTa [vsta.org]?
    I have been running couple of very humble 486-based boxen with some of these things lately for quite some time as well, it can be a nice and productive experience if you adjust to the capabilities of the granny hardware.. And it surely teaches you patience .)
  • use gentoo linux. kernel 2.4.19 should run very nicely on a 486. gentoo can compile everything specifically for your machine very easily. install X with fluxbox/blackbox. Dillo makes a great alternative browser for basic needs. And you can get netscape 4.71+ easily. Mozilla may be a little too big for you hardware.

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