i need to install linux in a 486 DX4 (don't laugh please) with 16 mb RAM and a 500 mb Hard Disk... any ideas. I only need it to navigate in the internet or listen to music

I run Redhat 4.2 on a similar machine, including Netscape 4.76. The cd player works on it, too. You may be out of luck with on-line music, though. You can probably even run Redhat 5.2, but the kernel (2.0.36 versus 2.0.30) and gui are basically the same, but you may have better luck with 4.2 due to your lack of memory. Any of the newer distributions will not work, out of the box, as they require at least a Pentium. You would need to have a machine already running Linux so you can compile a new kernel for i386 (or i486 if the option is there) instead of i586 (Pentium). However, I don't know of any of the major distributions (current) that would work with only 16 Meg of RAM (or even 32 for that matter), anyway. Note: upgrading to 32 meg has made a nice improvement to my Redhat 4.2 system. Good luck.

I have two Hard drive in My PC.One hard drive is for Linux Red Hat 9.0 and the other is XP I want to know that how to make internet sharing in Linux Red 9.0 via dialup connection. Because in XP & advance windows server, there is a option of internet sharing. With the best regards, yours truly, ghazanfar

"Any of the newer distributions will not work" The latest versions of both Slackware and Debian would work unmodified. Not well, but they'd work. Personally, I'd rather try to stip down the latest release of either, but the easiest way to run Linux on old hardware is to use an old distribution. Replacing the stock kernel, glibc, Mozilla, and GNOME/KDE is probably all that's required to make a modern distribtuion run on old hardware. A little more RAM would help greatly, but the problem would be finding the RAM, not the price of at least 64Mb. If you really want to be hardcore, don't install X. Use Lynx for web browsing and a command line CD player. I don't think a 486 is fast enough to play MP3s, but command line players exist. Possibly the best solution is to use the 486 as a thin client. It would be easy if your Athlon 1700 ran Linux, but it's still possible in Windows. You'd have to install Cygwin. Then you could run Linux programs in Windows on your main desktop and have them display on the 486! Ok, so only I would do something like that, but it's possible...

I've got a Slackware 8 distro... will that do?

If you want a full featured small complete distro try vectorlinux its based on slackware and comes with X and all the dev tools Download version 1.5 or 1.8 with x 3.3.6 www.vectorlinux.com

Excuse me. I should have said "most" (or some) of the newer distributions, not "any" (I was only thinking of RedHat and Mandrake at the time, as "most" questions here tend to be dealing with one of those two distros). Regardless, I don't believe going with any of the newer distros (RedHat or Mandrake, anyway) with 16 meg of RAM is going to be fruitful, even without the gui.