Need LINUX Recommendation

[deez]

Dug up an old IBM 486 laptop (40Mhz i think) that was collecting dust and want to try out LINUX. I have no LINUX experience and was wondering if anyone had any recommendations as to version to install. I have very little hard-disk space and 8Mb RAM

Any recommendations?????

 

[ken257]

With only 8 meg of ram and a small HD you are best to skip the gui and go command line only. An older version of Red Hat should work nice on that laptop, something like RH5.2 If you have trouble locating it let me know I have the full set of cd's for ti.

 

[PolyPill]

Yeah, something that old isn't going to impress you very much. A gui is possible, but wouldn't work very well. It will work well as a router. I also recomend an older version of Redhat.

 

[deez]

I'm not looking for a GUI, just something to fool around with. I'll check out redhat tonight and see what i can find. I figure if i can start with the old stuff on an old machine I can pick up the basics and actually learn something before starting with a new GUI version

 

[deez]

this is where i am

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/redhat-5.2-en/os/i386/

I am not exactly sure what to do next. I read the readme but it doesn't seem to help much. I have a little UNIX experience from using Sun Sparc workstations a few years ago

I'm not sure what to download or run

 

[David]

downloading Slackware floppy images might be an Idea. This will give you a CLI and is easy to download (I think there are floppy images).

If you download CD images then get the .iso files and burn them to a CD.

 

[ken257]

I took a look at the link you posted, there is nothing at that location for you to dl although you could do an ftp install but this is not recomended unless you have a very fast connction. What you want to look for is iso images of the cd's that you can dl and burn. Tucows has a lot of distros available for download but they are mostly just the current ones. I will have to take a look and see if I can find any old RH images.

 

[deez]

thanks for the help...i will have to download floppy images as i have no external CD-rom this is an old laptop. Will look around a bit and see what i can dig up

any other versions of LINUX you guys would recommend

 

[David]

There is zipslack (address unknown) which can install on a 100Meg FAT/FAT32 partition.

Even with turbolinux 6 you can get a CLI on an old machine. I have a coverdisc if you are interested?