I have a 486 with about 12MB RAM and 2gig HD setup as a Linux router box booting from a floppy. If I install Linux as an OS, would I be able to run a web page and/or email server off of it? If I did, would it be really slow?

Just a small question, if you have a 2 gig harddrive in it why would you want to boot from floppy? About using it as a server it kind of depends on what you are going to use it for. Ofcourse it won't be lightning fast. But for running just an email server and web server for a small group of people it should work without any problems. As long as you keep your web pages to a reasonable size and don't have hundreds of emails with large attachments. I think running the server will most likely be more dependent on the upload speed that the ISP gives you. Unless you are lucky and have upload speeds exceeding 100k/sec. But there are other factors which could come into play. You mentioned a 2gig harddrive which probably isn't the fastest and with only 12MB of ram you will be dependent on harddisk access since you can't cache much. As long as you don't plan to serve hundreds of users I suggest you just try it out. Mik

Like Mik said ram could be a factor. There is a chart on redhat linux that lets you know how much ram you need for the services you are running on your system ex. sendmail, apache, print server etc. DSL works great for serving pages and it reletivly inexspensive.

I have a 486-100 with 32 Mb RAM and a 1 GB hard drive split into 2 partitions (/ and /home). It runs apache, telnet (I can't get OpenSSH installed!!!), ftp and it acts as a router for my network. I have java 1.2.2 and gcc installed. I use it for developing (That's a joke 8) internet software. I have no problems with network/internet slowdown because of it. I average 10 - 90kbps downloads but then I'm just under 3 miles from the DSL hub. Try it out. I don't think you'll have problems unless you want to do some major, memory intensive work over the internet with it.