Could an Intel 486 wake up with FC3

[Matthew Saltzman]

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
>> Mohan
> It 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