[lug] Installation Guidance Needed

[Nate Duehr]

Two things...

> 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 ;-)

Agreed here.  I have four Pentium-I class machines doing various duty at
home, and if you count the things they do as "servers" they're getting more
"use" than my P-III laptop.

> 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 ...)

On Debian anyway, no need to go with an "old" one... the current release is
always customizable to be just about as small as you like.  No need to use
old software.

If you don't want to download Debian, I've always found www.cheapbytes.com
very inexpensive for CD-ROM's of all sorts of distros and things, and fast
to ship.

Nate Duehr, nate at natetech.com