Hi Ethan !
I will 2nd Ian's call.. if you have played with
Linux for a while then Debian is a great distro for
what you want.
I have a 486-33 with a 800 Meg HD.. and 24 megs of
RAM. This machine uses Fluxbox for a desktop and has
Debian "woody" on it currently.
My particular laptop has no CD rom therefore I had
to go through the rather painful process of loading
all 30 floppies which took sometime but the end result
was awesome ! After you get the install done I
would stick with the lighter weight applications..
AbiWord is the processor I have on that machine.. I
have X-siag for a spreadsheet. Impress for
presentations. Gullo ( I think that is right) for a
browser.. and quite a few card games.. a pool game.. 2
flight sims ( sorta painful graphics but it works)..
a Pac man clone and a database called Gaby.
I love that machine.. and take it with me where I
can.. and although it takes a while to boot.. after
its up.. its about as fast as most of the win2K
machines.. I take it to Borders with me occasionally
and some of the people who are there with more modern
machines peek around at my laptop and occasionally ask
what I have on it.. etc. Now all I need is a bigger
HD for it..
Hope that helps !
Mark
--- ethan zimmerman <lists@ethanzimmerman.com> wrote:
> 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
>
> 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)
>
> 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?
>
> 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)
>
> So if anyone can help me with the project it would
> be.. uhm ...helpful
>
>
>
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