Hi Mark, It does not look as if you were expecting too much, but a little bit more RAM would be nice. Since you don't want to run X anyway, 16 MB would be nice for a start. More RAM will help you more than a faster CPU here.
Re distros: when I first started using Linux on a 386, it was Slackware, which came on a handful of floppies at that time. Later I switched to SuSE, which has (almost exclusively) been my development and production distro since. I have a very basic SuSE 7.1 on a WD Caviar 1210 (212 MB) for testing purposes, which you are welcome to borrow. This would only be good for testing, since the kernel is not up-to-date from a security point of view. I know SuSE 7.3 was fine with 486 CPUs, because I have been using it since it was released. I could email you the CD/package index file (only 50 kB), so you could see which CDs you really need. To get started you would probably only need CD1, which I could burn for you at a nominal fee. The boot floppies for old CPUs are also on the CD. I also have SuSE 7.1, 6.4, and 5.1. Ah, and some Free BSD which also runs on a 486. I got it, because at that time ATM support in Free BSD was better than in any other distro. On Sun, 26 Jan 2003, Mark Carey wrote: ... > Creative Sound Blaster 16 (CT2910, IDE, Panasonic CDROM "IDE like" > connector) ... This is not one of these SB CD-ROM drives that came with the SB card, right? They were a bit special, being neither ATAPI nor SCSI... ... > * 1 Creative CDROM CD400T Is this standard IDE/ATAPI? IIRC there was some trick, some special driver you have to have for the early CD-ROMs that came with the SB audio cards. But from your intended application, I would guess once you have the machine running, you don't want to change it every two hours any more. So why not take some CD-ROM which is known to work properly for an install? Just put it in for the install, and remove it when everything is fine. Just in case the drive is the problem. If the CD-ROM really is the problem, which might be the case from your description, there are still at least three other possible ways to install: 1. Take HD to a running box with proven CD functionality, install there, and take HD back to old box. 2. Boot from a floppy with PLIP driver, and install with a laplink cable via the parallel port from another machine with working CD-ROM. I have done this a couple of times for notebooks without CD drive. It works, but is slow. 3. Boot from a floppy with Ethernet driver, and install via LAN from another machine with working CD-ROM. This is a bit faster than # 2. Hope this helps, Helmut. +----------------+ | Helmut Walle | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +----------------+
