[lug] Installation Guidance Needed

[rm at fabula.de]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 08:06:37AM -0700, Nate Duehr wrote:
> [... good advice here ...]
> If you're having trouble, I'd bet a number of people on the mailing list
> here could bring along a floppy and CD appropriate for each other to a LUG
> meeting.
> 
> I have a number of old machines doing various duty.  You will find that
> they'll run Linux just fine (maybe a bit slowly) but if you try to use X
> (the windowed user interface that's graphical) on them they're going to be
> painfully slow.  Of course, slow is always relative... if you have lots of
> time on your hands and don't mind waiting for windows to draw themselves on
> the screen and you're just learning -- it may not be a problem for you.

Well, i recall doing pretty o.k. work on 486 (with X). Somehow i can't understand
why todays software needs such ridiculous amounts of memory and cycles ;-)

But anyway, one warning (even so i'm not a hardware guy):
As Mr. Rose wrote:

  > I figure I'll install the hard drive, configure the BIOS for it, run FDISK
  > (from a bootable Windows 98 floppy I have), and then format it. But the

Somehow i fear this won't work. The smallest IDE drives i seem to be
able to buy are in the 10xn Gb range. I doubt that an old 486 with 
the original bios will be able to deal with those. It might be possible
with tweaking partitions etc. but definitely not fun.
As for the right distro: Mandrake seems out here. I'd go for an old
SuSE or Debian (i keep a bookshelf full of old Linux Boxes, just for
such cases ...)

  hth Ralf Mattes