Mini Linuxes

[jtnelson at bbnplanet.com (Jason Nelson)]

>I just got an ICQ message from a kid with a 386SX who wants to run Linux. 
>I pointed him at both the Red Hat as well as Debian site. He's got an old 
>Packard Bell with very little RAM (he says 2MB), I suspect he has more. I 
>don't think he has a cd-rom. I do know that the Debian distribution has a 
>floppy only install, but I am not sure I would want a beginner to start with 
>Debian, even as good as it is.

Jerry,

I installed RH5.2 on a Packard Bell 486sx 25Mhz with 6MB of RAM and (Mine
had 2MB onboard with 4 MB addon RAM).  The trick to installing it with less
than Red Hats supposed minimum of 8MB of RAM is installing it on another
machine (if one has one available or friend willing) then swaping the hard
drive into the other machine.   Make sure not to have it start in Run Level
5 and run Xconfigurator when booting up on the Pac Bell machine(or don't
run X at all).  I had it boot from a boot floppy.  It ran flawlessy (with
min processes running ie no sendmail, only needed deamons etc).  It could
run X albeit slowly.  I don't know if this is possible with RH6.0 or with
2MB of RAM.  I upgraded mine to 16 megs and have 4 1MB modules hanging
around I don't need.  If he wants them I believe they should be compatible
(a Pac Bell Legend I forget the exact model).   

Jason


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