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Antique Distros?

Posted by Cliff on 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."

2 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. One option by drdink · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Assuming you have more than 4 or 8MB of RAM, I would suggest try putting FreeBSD on it. You can download the FreeBSD ISOs here 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.)

    --
    Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
  2. Re:Early Slackware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful
    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.