On Sun, 30 Jan 2005, Steven Pasternak wrote:
On Sunday 30 January 2005 03:23, Kumara wrote:Could somebody advice me if it is a good idea to do so. I have an Intel 486 DX4-S mechine with 504MBs of HDD and 16MB's of RAM. it is hardly running windows 98 and Internet. (very slow and with a lot of crashes and stucks). could someone advice me to put FC1 on it and test??? May I try it? hope your advice from the list. I want to enjoy the power of Linux in different ways ThX in advance MohanIt might. It CAN'T run i586 or i686 rpms though. I would advice older software, like RH6.2 (it is painful, but does at least have the kde and gnome desktop). Most kernel 2.6.x based distros only build the kernel for i586+ and that most kernel <2.6 build for i386+. Besides, old software is for old hardware and is better for low RAM and low HD space. My old i486 still runs Win95! The 'power of linux' that was written for this old thing is kernel ~1.x-2.0!
I have a 486 laptop running RH7.3 as a firewall. It's quite happy running kernel-2.4.20-37.7.legacy, iptables, no X. That version of GNOME was the last "lightweight" one, though. If you need X on your hardware, XFCE is the way to go. There are other distros that are designed for older/slower hardware too, but I couldn't refer you to one at this point.
See also www.rule-project.org. They have low-memory installers for RH8 and RH9. They are supposed to be working on an FC-based version, but I haven't seen much progress recently.
You can't install FC on anything less than an i586 now without rebuilding pieces of it (no i386 kernel, for example), and it looks like FC4 will abandon even that.
-- Matthew Saltzman
Clemson University Math Sciences mjs AT clemson DOT edu http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs
