Installing Linux On Old Hardware?

cptdondo writes "I've got an old laptop that I've been trying to resurrect. It has a 486MHz CPU, 28 MB of RAM, a 720 MB HD, a 1.44MB floppy drive, and 640x480 VESA video. It does not have a CD drive, USB port, or a network port. It has PCMCIA, and I have a network card for that. My goal is to get a minimal GUI that lets me run a basic browser like Dillo and open a couple of xterms. I've spent the last few days trying to find a Linux distro that will work on that machine. I've done a lot of work on OpenWRT, so naturally I though that would work, but X appears to be broken in the recent builds — I can't get the keyboard to work. (OK, not surprising; OpenWRT is made to run on WiFi Access Point hardware which doesn't have a keyboard...) All of the 'mini' distros come as a live CD; useless on a machine without a CD-ROM. Ditto for the USB images. I'm also finding that the definition of a 'mini' distro has gotten to the point of 'It fits on a 3GB partition and needs 128 MB RAM to run.' Has Linux really become that bloated? Do we really need 2.2 GB of cruft to bring up a simple X session? Is there a distro that provides direct ext2 images instead of live CDs?"

Comments

3.11

[heffrey]

for workgroups

Re:too old

[Arlet]

Apparently not

Re:To not create garbage.

[Pentium100]

And how do I get that $100?

Also, using old hardware is fun.

So 15 is 20 now?

[localroger]

SRSLY the hardware in question was state of the art in 1994, which was when I bought a spiffy new DX266 instead of a then-dodgy P75. If you think 2009-1994=20 then I suspect you're using one of those dodgy early Pentiums.