Les Mikesell wrote:
On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 13:29, Mike McCarty wrote:
I don't know of any which can run on a 486 in 16MB of RAM and no swap. I've got a 486 (actually an AMD586) which I'd like to run Knoppix or the like on. It has 16MB of RAM, but very little hard disc. It has a 3GB HD partitioned into two FAT16 partitions, one of them full, the other with 40MB free. I'd like to run almost any version of Linux on there, for purposes of file transfer. It has an old 10 Base 2, but I could probably put a 100 Base T on there, as it has one PCI slot (IIRC).
This would be the obvious place to start: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Have a download in progress even as we speak. :-)
but you might be able to get knoppix to load if you don't try to run X. Try 'knoppix 2' at the boot prompt with as old a version as you can find. If that works, you might be able to run as an xterminal with your desktop elsewhere by starting X with 'X -query server' where server is a more powerful box with XDCMP enabled. You'd have a better chance with 32M ram, though.
It's worth a try, anyway. I like Knoppix. But I've not had much success getting it to run on old machines. I have a 90MHz Pentium machine which can just *barely* run Knoppix. It takes like 1/2 hour to boot. Knoppix really needs a swap with only 32MB of memory. I haven't gotten it to run on my 486 at all. I'd like to set it up as a server, and use that as a connection for backing up the discs over there.
What I've done in past is reboot my main Windows 98 machine using an MSDOS floppy and use pkzip to zip up one directory tree after another, then transfer the files using Interlnk over a serial cable. As you can guess, this is slow. But it does allow me to back up that machine on CDROMs. I'd like to be able to use a network connection and transfer files that way.
There's probably a way to get those files to my Linux machine using something, but I don't know what that is, and haven't searched for it. Maybe I'll do a Google in a minute...
Mike