> Okay I wish to breathe new life into old hardware by turning an old pc
> into an email-checking-web-browsing-solitaire-playing machine.
>
> First the bad news (the hardware)...
> - 486DX 50Mhz
> - the bios can't see partitions bigger than 512MB
> - and it's running windows 95 (hehe)
>
> What I want...
> - a GUI with Mozilla (hopefully epiphany), Games, Gaim and XMMS
> - I would like to use GNOME, but then again I would also like to be
> relaxing on a beach with a drink in one hand a small team of experts
> nearby working out ways they can be nice to me
A GUI and Gaim and solitaire-like games won't be a problem. XMMS may be marginal - I got my 486DX/33 to (barely) play mp3s with mpg123 hard-tweaked for 486, but it would skip if something else (ANYTHING else) was running. Mozilla and GNOME or KDE likely will be a problem, unless the thing has 128MB of ram (which I suppose it doesn't - my 486 came with 4MB onboard and one expansion slot)
> I know linux will work just fine but what about X? Will X even run? If
> so will XFCE run? (seeing as how gnome probably won't)
X will run, xfce or icewm or windowmaker or afterstep or blackbox or sawfish or even a lightly-configured enlightenment will run.
> Oh and if that's not hard enough the bios can't see partitions bigger
> than 512 MB. I've got a 3 gig and a 1 gig hard drive that I'm going to
> cut into 500 MB pieces and install. So how do I install linux on a
> system with 7 500MB partitions?
I agree with Paul - Linux doesn't care what the bios can see; you shouldn't need to split your drives into 500M chunks.
> Also I'm thinking of using debian because it seems to be a pretty
> minimal distro (I haven't played with it much except with knoppix
> remastering)
Debian can work well for this sort of thing because it lets you fine-tune exactly which packages you want installed. I once had a minimal installation with X in about 100 MB, but that was back when you only needed 4MB of ram to boot the installer...
If you're planning on running this machine on a network with other, more modern X11 machines, you might consider using it as a remote X station using xdmcp (I did this in the past - used xdmcp to make my 486 a graphical remote login terminal to my K6-2 machine on a 10Mbit LAN. It ran very smoothly.) or a thin client using something like ltsp.
I also agree with most of the stuff Paul and Ian have said.
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