which Linux distro would run on a 486 or a pentium 200 (even with MMX)

Mon Nov 22 02:04:11 UTC 2004

On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 20:50:33 EST, the world broke into rejoicing as
"Simon Tonekham" <simon_128-PkbjNfxxIARBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> said: > <html><div
style='background-color:'><DIV class=RTE>I was just wondering, which
linux distro would run on a 486 with 4 to 8MB of RAM with 1GB har d
drive or maybe a Pentium 200 (even with MMX technology) with 16MB of RAM
and 2GB hard drive. The reason that I'm asking this is that I want to
know if older machines could run Linux depending on the distro and can
be capable of surfing the internet and doing work processing tasks. In
my opinion, If I want something substancal for example playing music
files, I have to get a bigger system like a pentium 2, 3 or
4. Currently, I have a P4 Computer with 256MB of RDRAM, 30GB Hard Drive
(planning to upgrade to 80 or 120GB hard drive by the end of the year)
and my computer is currently running Windows XP P rofessional with SP2
('i'm going to dual boot with Fedora Core 3 by the end of next year,
just to try out with Linux.</DIV> > <DIV class=RTE> </DIV> > <DIV
class=RTE>What is your suggestion? </DIV> > <DIV class=RTE> </DIV>

That HTML stuff looks really ugly; you might want to fix your mail
client to use text instead...

Anyhoo, it's certainly _possible_ to do this sort of thing...

You may want something a bit more powerful than that in in that playing
MP3s is pretty close to chewing up the CPU power of a 200MHz system.

Your choices for distributions are mainly two:

 1.  Slackware
 2.  Debian

Those are the most notable ones that support running pretty totally in
text mode.  Contrast with RHAT/Mandrake/SuSE that like having plenty of
graphical components installed...
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