Wich kernel to use on a PC with 4MB RAM

[v6sa]

Hello! I have one old PC with 386DX 40MHz processor (no math co-processor) and only 4MB memory, actually when booting it says 3780k. Wich kind of kernel could i get booting on such junk (without initrd ofcourse, other stuff on a harddisk with swap)? It should be newest kernel possible, since i think i need support for PCMCIA CDROM. That could be done as module. For speedup i think i can replace harddisk with flash memory and required adaptor.

[Opnosforatou]

oooo.. Maybe turn to the old versions of slackware.
Or build you own current kernel from the source and strip it down to the max.

Getting linux to work on a machine like that will take some time and a knowledge of the hardware inside.

Are you sure you want to do this ?

Take a look here : http://www.nl.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/whatislfs.html

Maybe this can help ya on ya way.


This might help too with searching for a distro: http://www.linux.org/dist/list.html

[drakebasher]

Following is from Slackware 8.0 lowmem.txt:

• Additional forward (warning/disclaimer) added Sat Apr 11 00:19:57 CDT 1998:
  
  Well, I've been told that many (most?) machines with 4 megabytes of RAM
  choke trying to boot the smallest Slackware bootdisk (bare.i). If that's
  the case, it's probably time for installation to machines with less than
  8 megabytes to become officially unsupported. It *might* still be possible,
  though, and I'm not against people continuing to try. That's why I'll
  continue to include this file of hints, as well as the old, obsolete 1.44
  megabyte rootdisk images (now in rootdsks/obsolete/). Just don't ask me
  how to install on your 4 megabyte machine, because I'll tell you: "OK, well
  first you need to get some more SIMMs..."
  
  NOTE: A "lowmem.i" bootdisk has been added that saves even more memory than
  bare.i at the expense of some features. So, people with low memory machines
  have one more option to try.

I think Slackware 8.0 is based on the 2. kernel. The site has other, earlier kernels starting from the 2.0.30 kernel. Other than hacking the kernel source yourself, I don't know of any other source for code this light.

[namezk]

take a look at DamnSmallLinux.

[drakebasher]

take a look at DamnSmallLinux.

This thread suggests that DSL needs a good deal more than 4Mb

[*DEAD*]

lol, isnt it time to get a new comp