what to do with a 486

[sailingoncheese]

iv got an old 486 running with a clock speed of 88 and its got 16mb of ram 400MB hard drive and 2 NIC's. i'v tried to run smooth wall but i couldnt get it configured right, this should tell you of how much i know about linux. is there a "user freindly" or as user freindly as linux can be that would run on it? or any outher uses for such an old computer would be helpfull
thanks
-brian

[Dolda2000]

I'd say that it's probably great for say, a router, a mail server or anything like that. Find more RAM for it if you can, that's probably the greatest bottleneck. There are indeed popular web servers running on as low-end systems as 66 MHz 486's, and probably even lower than that.
I suggest that you learn a greater bit about Linux/UNIX first, though. You're not very likely to get an out-of-the-box distro to run fast on it.

[Hazmat]

Try mandrake, the install is as simple as any i've ever seen. I had a comp. with similar stats once running linux, did fairly well so long as you didnt really want to use the GUI... ran a comand line just fine. i used mine to start learning about the diffrences between windows and linux programming (expect realllly slow compile times here) and to host a telnet BBS.

have fun!
-jordan

[sailingoncheese]

any version of mandrake? yeah i did try to put smoothwall on it but i already have a router so after it didnt work i didnt try to screw with it.
-brian

[l_Kriss]

install mulinux on it


Good Luck

[sailingoncheese]

i checked out the web site for mulinux and i cant figure out what file to download for the OS or the boot floppy and i want to tackle learning linux on my own haha

[drspin]

Hello -

I would say install Gentoo on it to save space and for the performance and configure a nice firewall

Cole

[Dolda2000]

I was going to suggest using Gentoo myself, but the thing is that it will probably take several days to compile everything on that computer. But if you're patient enough, then sure enough, gentoo would be the way to go.