What distros support 486 machines?

[gboyce at badbelly.com]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003 nmeyers at javalinux.net wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 27, 2003 at 07:52:22AM -0500, Bill Horne wrote:
> > Although I'm not yet so fed up with RedHat as David, I'll take 
> > this opportunity to ask about distros that support 486 machines
> > in their current release.
> > 
> > RedHat isn't supporting 486-based machines, and since I just spent 
> > $1.86 on a new bios battery, I'd like to keep my 486 going for a 
> > few more decades. 
> > 
> > Which distros currently support 486's? Which are committed to supporting
> > the 486 in the future?
> 
> Gentoo supports whatever arch you build it for - including 486.  You'll
> probably want to learn about techniques that let you build on other,
> faster machines and then move the binary packages over to the 486.

If you want to go the gentoo route, I would definitely suggest looking at 
the distcc documentation for Gentoo. 

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/distcc.xml

distcc allows you to pass off compiliation to another machine or group of 
machines.  If you have several other desktop machines nearby, you can have 
a cheap little compiler farm using the idle cycles of your other machines.

Otherwise Debian should work well on 486 machines assuming you're 
sticking primarily with console.  X on a 486 is doable, but slow.

Greg.