On Tuesday 30 April 2002 19:44, Chris Herrnberger wrote:

Dont quote me on this, but if I remember correctly the bios limitations for HD's are not applicable to linux in general. I seem to remember being able to install larger drives than 500megs on boxes with that limitation under dos.

As I do more reading on this - with the very limited references to this subject - this is what I have come up with too. I'll give it a try and see what happens.

mini distro that will work with the low RAM that you have.

I have already got a mini distro up and running successfully - BasicLinux. It worked great. Now I want to push the limits even further... and get X and a simple WM up and running. Ultimately I want to use this system as a simple web browser and a remote access machine for my main SuSE Linux machine... don't know how feasable it is, but it's a good learning experience. (after that, it's on to my old AtariST - I read somewhere that people have managed to get Linux working on a dumb terminal mode on these things)

Also if memory servse correctly the limitations of SuSE on memory are not kernel or application dependant, rather YAST dependant. If you can live without YAST then it 'could' live on the machine as well. Make it headless, and via NFS or via serial link update and control from another machine.

Well it's definitely not the kernel. The Slackware8.0 I am working with uses 2.4.x quite nicely on the 386. Never thought of the headless machine. Living without YAST is not too much trouble, but I actually want to install it using some standard install scripts provided with mainstream distros. I could do a "roll your own" but that's the hard way. I have been given a challenge from a Windows Borg friend who wants to chant "I told you so" that Linux will not run on old hardware, and that I will have to revert back to DOS and Win3.11. I have already proved him wrong with BasicLinux... now I just have to show him how easy it is to install and config a WM ;-) C.