Hello

[Daniel R . Kilbourne]

I personally have never tried linux of any flavor on hardware that minimal,
but I had FreeBSD 4.x running like a champ on a 386 with 4 MB RAM.

Have you considered/would you consider BSD versus Linux?



Mike Rambo extolled:
> Ben Pfaff wrote:
> > 
> > jtuma@ia4u.net writes:
> > 
> > >     I'm interested in using some form of Linux on a 486DX2-66 with 8 meg
> > > to be an internet server on my projected home network.  I'm told the 486
> > > is adequate for this purpose - I'm not interested in a fancy GUI - just
> > > want to be able to dial up the net and feed it to my network.  I'd
> > > appreciate any advice from anyone - my Linux knowledge is very limited,
> > > but I'm interested in learning.  I understand I just missed an install
> > > fest in December, but could make one of your Sunday night meetings -
> > > please advise.  Thank you very much.
> > 
> > I'd start by installing a minimal distribution--perhaps Debian
> > without selecting very many packages--then installing pppd and
> > diald and setting up masquerading.  There is lots of information
> > on diald in its documentation and on masquerading in the
> > IP-Masquerading HOWTO.  I also have written up a brief
> > description of what can be done on my website; check it out at
> >         http://www.msu.edu/~pfaffben/writings/index.html
> > --
> > "Writing is easy.
> >  All you do is sit in front of a typewriter and open a vein."
> > --Walter Smith
> 
> ...you don't even need diald anymore as the pppd daemon has had demand
> dial support added.  It's much easier than diald too...
> 
> Ben's right about the minimal system too.  With only 8MB of ram you
> probably don't want to even think about using a GUI as you'd get old
> waiting for it to load plus it'd probably be quite unpleasant to use.
> 
> Many others in the group can recommend a debian version, though I
> suspect it'd be whatever is the most recent stable version.  If you look
> at RedHat you'd probably be best off to avoid the newest 7.0 version. 
> Get 6.2 instead and apply all the updates.  We have a couple dozen 6.2
> boxes that run very trouble free.  Version 7.0 can't say that from what
> I've read.
> 
> I'd avoid Mandrake on the hardware you have listed.  If you could use a
> GUI Mandrake might be the easiest to use after installing but without
> the GUI tools it's not much different than RedHat and it is usually a
> much bigger install for little or no significant gain otherwise as all
> the bells and whistles are GUI oriented.
> 
> My 2 cents 8-).
> 
> 
> -- 
> Mike Rambo
> mrambo@lsd.k12.mi.us
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> linux-user mailing list
> linux-user@egr.msu.edu
> http://www.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user

-- 
--------------------------------
Daniel R. Kilbourne
daniel.kilbourne@voyager.net
Network Engineering
Voyager.net - A CoreComm Company
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