Resurection of 1980's Hardware?

[LostZXC]

I would like to know what the minimum sized linux installation is. I am trying to decide if I want to use FreeBSD or some flavor of linux on some old hardware.... I think that the original operating systems are still intact, but I would like to interface the old machines with some modern ones... I think that means that I should install linux or FreeBSD on all of them, so I can use the same language... Anyone have any advice?
Please note that I am new to linux, and have yet to even get really started. My current stumbling block is figuring out how to access kwallet. I installed it I think. The point being I would like to know if I want linux or FreeBSD for my old friends who have been dormant too long....

[bigtomrodney]

If you intend running on a 386 you may well be looking at going back to the earliest versions of Linux if for no other reason than your hardware will have little to spare. What kind of hardware do you have?

Put it this way...kwallet won't even come into the equation

I'd imagine you'd be running command line or something extremely light in terms of a GUI.

[Jonathan183]

The 80's cover quite a range of hardware from the original PC, XT, AT class machines etc. what spec do you have for the machines eg processor type & speed, how much ram does the machine have, what graphics adapter, and what network interfaces do you have/intend using?

[i92guboj]

As people said, there's a wide range of different architectures and cpu types on the decade of the 1980's. Some of them will run linux, some won't.

If you are speaking about the so called ibm-pc architecture, only machines that can work in 32 bits protected mode will do (at least 386). MIPS and motorola 68k cpus should work ok as well. There are a big lot of architectures so I can't enumerate them all here.

Let us know which kind of cpu's do your machines have and we will try to give a more definitive answer. In any case, a 2.4 kernel should be ok to run on that hardware. I don't advise 2.6 kernels for that kind of hardware, plus 2.4 is still supported and updated regularly for bug fixes and security patches.

I don't recommend anything below that if your machines are going to be connected to the internet, because 2.2 is not updated anymore, and it could pose a security risk. Anyway, there's no reason why any linux-capable machine couldn't run a 2.4 kernel.