Well, I finally found enough time to locate a couple of floppies, write the Red Hat 9 boot images to them, and try and boot my ancient 486 laptop into Linux. Naturally, I wasn't expecting to install RH9 on this thing (indeed it said I don't have enough RAM to do so)--I just wanted to see if I could get Linux to recognize the PCMCIA ethernet card using just the boot disks, enough to get me into a network install. (It doesn't have a CD drive.) But poor RH9 wouldn't even do that for me.
So, my question is: what distro would you use for a laptop this ancient? The first thing I'm looking for is something that will recognize the network, so I can copy off all the important Windows 3.1 (yes, you read that correctly, 3.1) files I've got on here, then wipe the disk clean and hopefully get some kind of Linux on here. A minimal X server would be nice if the hardware could handle it. Here's the full specs (so far as I can tell): 486 DX4 100 Mhz processor 16 MB memory 740 MB hard drive SMC8036TX EZ Card 10/100 PCMCIA ethernet 1.44 floppy, no CD-ROM or anything fancy And that's about it. Any suggestions? ~ ross ____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
