Karl F. Larsen wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:
> I plan to load this into an old 386-SX box 4 meg ram, 40 meg HD.
> It's just for packet, so don't need to load too much into the box.
KFL> Your in for a lot of trouble. I do not think Red Hat 5.2
KFL> is going to load well on such a modest computer. It is
KFL> smaller than my old laptop! To load it you will need a
KFL> floppy disk version. You need to go back to slackware 3.4
KFL> and only load the bare system. It will be very slow and not
KFL> much fun.
KFL> Spend a little money and get a new motherboard and 32 meg
KFL> of ram and a 4 gig hard drive.
On the other hand, Debian has a low memory installation procedure using a
special startup floppy, and, as John Ackermann noted, it is easier to configure
by hand. This will be important because, while Linux will run fine in 4 MB RAM
for certain things, X/Windows will be hopeless. A very minimal Linux
installation is about 15 MB, so it could be done if you are experienced with
this sort of thing.
I would note that operating Linux on a 4 MB machine is going to require that
the kernel be recompiled with the absolute minimum needed for your hardware,
and that recompiling on a 4 MB machine like this could take over a day. It
would be very helpful if you had a more modern machine running Linux that could
be used to build kernels for the smaller one, even a friend's.
-- Mike
