its such an awful shame to toss a 486. windows abandoned them nearly a decade ago! its up to linux to make these fallen soldiers ride again. so which distro provides a workable interface for newbies(IE a GUI) and will run on the following: 486SX2/66MHz 53 Megs of ram 2 gig HD 1MB vid card i have several of these machines, i just couldnt let anyone throw them away. what do people sudgest as a viable distro? i've looked at peanut, vector, and all the floppy-oppy's(which drive me nuts). mandrake 6.1 AND red hat7.2 all refuse to install on less than 64 megs of ram. slackware is TOO hard! debain and suse all like 64 megs too, or atleast the only versions i could find did. i wanna have phun with it using apache n' whatever else will boost the networking skills. thanks!

Just some thoughts on the older 486 situation. I have an IBM PS/1 with a 25mhz bus, upgraded to an Evergreen 586 processor,and 32 MB of 30-pin ram. I have a 1 GB hard drive. I dual boot Redhat 6.1 and Windows 95. It runs both of them fairly well, but slow compared to other machines that I have that are at least Pentium 75 or 90 based. Now, back to the IBM PS/1. I hooked up a 50x cdrom drive to do the Redhat install, and used dos interlnk/intersvr to place all of the win95 installer files on the drive through the serial port. I can run Opera 6 on both OS's. I can use KDE, Gnome or AnotherLevel in Redhat. Win 95, once set up, is very nice, but Redhat will give you years of fun with the configuration. Go to: http://www.rapidweather.com and look down the page for the "linux" button, and there is information on how to get your Redhat 6.1 connected to the internet without using the kppp setup. One thing about 486's, however. They should be upgraded to run linux, or you will need a nice glacier outside your window to watch while you wait and wait for things to happen. linux really needs a pentium of some sort to do well. I have run Windows 98 on the PS/1, and it is as good as win 95, but again, too easy to set up. Linux is great fun if you have a little experience fooling around with it.

Have you tried mulinux. Its an expandable floppy version with x11 windows expansion available and can run Netscape 3.0 if all is "cloned" to hardrive. Netscape 3.0 cant be run if using mu in ramdisk only. Far as I know this is best and most complete version of Linux to run on 386 and 486 computers.