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

[Seneca]

On Sun, Nov 21, 2004 at 08:50:33PM -0500, Simon Tonekham wrote:
> I was just wondering, which linux distro would run on a 486 with 4 to
> 8MB of RAM with 1GB hard 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 Professional with SP2 ('i'm going to dual boot with
> Fedora Core 3 by the end of next year, just to try out with
> Linux.
> 
> What is your suggestion?

Your pentium is not too dissimilar to my older laptop, still in everyday
use.  What I run on it is a stripped down Debian sid install with
qt-embedded and Opie for a GUI (the system doesn't really /need/ a GUI
and it ran happily without one for a couple years, but it's easier to
read pdf-formatted lecture slides with one).  The choice in graphical
applications is lower, due to its lack of X, but it meets my
requirements.

The 486 would make a pretty good terminal, but it should be reserved for
text-based use.

For both systems, you should consider Debian or Slackware.  If you use
Debian, watch your apt usage (speaking from experience, P100 laptop,
16MB RAM, loadavg > 50, apt-get upgrade took a week to run) and you may
want to ignore it (post-stripping down) in favour of dpkg and manual
dependencies and downloading if what you're grabbing is not excessive.

If you choose to go the graphical route with your older systems, note
down and research the video cards.  Not all of them are supported by
X or by the kernel framebuffer drivers (the vesafb driver is for
VESA 2.0), but it may be possible to get them to pretend to be VESA 2.0
with a little help from DOS at the cost of about 1MB RAM.

-- 
Seneca
seneca-cunningham-bJEeYj9oJeDQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
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