On Sun, Aug 12, 2001 at 06:15:20PM -0400, dopler2@juno.com wrote:
> I'm a 'po boy with a 486 I want to put LINUX on. I have a 1 gig hard
> drive, with a 300 meg partition dedicated to Caldera Dos 7.03 and Windows
> 3.1. The other 700 I've partitioned for LINUX. The monitor is a VGA, but
> not SVGA I don't think.
You don't mention how much memory you have. To run Netscape and the
like, you'll need at X Windows. X _will_ run in as little as about 8M of
memory, but will be very slow. Note that with a VGA monitor, you'll get
no better than 640x480 resolution on that monitor. You will also be
limited color-wise, and Netscape is not fond of being in that situation.
You will also need a swap partition equal to twice the size of your
memory.
Your other problem will be this: Netscape says they require a minimum
(last I checked) of 64M memory to run. That's not actually true. I've
run it in half that, but I can't guarantee its stability.
You may have to shoehorn things to get what you want into 700M.
Because 486's usually have limited memory and such, they usually aren't
suited to running X-Windows, which is where you get things like Netscape
and word processors. As a result, we usually recommend using them as
servers, routers or gateways, since those machines don't normally need
to run X-Windows. If you're running Caldera DOS (DR-DOS/OpenDOS), you're
probably familiar with the command line. That's adequate for a lot of
things in Linux. While there aren't any console-mode word processors I
know of, there are several console-mode (non-X-Windows) browsers
available, including Lynx.
Why the distros you've tried don't install is anyone's guess. It may be
that you have some funky hardware (from a Linux viewpoint). Or that
you're doing something wrong on the install. You can bring your machine
to a meeting for help with this. Otherwise, post specific symptoms here
and maybe we can troubleshoot. Someone mentioned Peanut Linux, which
might work (I don't know if it has X). Slackware might work as well, and
probably has less stringent hardware requirements than others. Do not
use Mandrake, as it will not run on your 486 (it's built for Pentiums
and better).
HTH,
Paul
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