Could an Intel 486 wake up with FC3

[Jeff Vian]

On Sun, 2005-01-30 at 05:20 -0800, Michael 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
> 
It should do well with a test based install of RH 7.3 or maybe even RH
9.
I would not try any of the fedora installs on it, simply because of the
limited memory and old processor.

Some people have gotten Fedora to work on the older and slower systems,
but it takes a lot to make it work, and even more patience to put up
with its speed.

RH 7.3 OTOH would work well, and if you are using it as a file server or
a firewall box, can handle it well.

> You'd probably have better luck with a more minimalist distro as a 
> machine of that kind isn't going to have the resources required to run 
> most of the stuff that comes with Fedora. I'm not every sure if Fedora 
> comes with i386 packages still. (Anyone know? I don't feel like checking.)
> 
> Do you have any other Linux computers? If you do then you can run your 
> programs on them and use your older machine as a terminal using XDMCP, 
> VNC, or whatever. That'd mean that you could get by with a very basic 
> install of Linux and X without needing much in the way of extra software 
> installed. It'd also probably run your programs much faster than your 
> 486. If you want this to be a desktop machine I'd suggest going that route.
> 
> As an alternative, if the 486 has a cd drive then I'd suggest trying a 
> cd-based distro. You could use your hard drive just for saving your own 
> files to. Again it might take some work to find one that'll run on such 
> a limited machine but I expect it's doable. Look at Morphix maybe.
> 
> -- 
> Michael <mogmios at mlug.missouri.edu>
> http://kavlon.org
>