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/ 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.