Hi, all!

Here's my latest hardware fiasco:

I'm upgrading an old 486er I have laying around. This is a "genuine" IBM, originally running Windoze 3.1, to which I added a 2-G HDD and a CD-ROM, also some extra DIMM sticks I had laying around. Originally, I was looking for a new home for the Windoze98 files I have on the 2-G HDD(half-my-life's-work in Basic and C source code, plus half a dozen compilers). Using a boot floppy, I have at least gotten it up enough to access all drives in DOS mode. But when I try to re-install Windows 98 on this beast, it says it won't run without a math co-processor.

I open the hood back up, and sure enough, I'm running an i486 SX (!!!) 168-pin chip in a socket-3 mobo (with NO upgrade sockets!).

My question is, presuming that I can't upgrade this machine any further (it's a Compaq! got it free off a friend, of course!), what kinds of Linux will run happily on it? Also, the chip has NO heat sink or fan! I presume that it never would run hot enough to need one?

And finally, the socket seems to have many more pin-holes than is needed for the 168-pin chip. Was the original purchaser ripped off? And what else could I get these days that will fit in there?

I have a Tandy 486-SX here that's happily running Debian Woody and a custom kernel. It currently has 143 days uptime. If you can pack more ram into it - do so. I wouldn't try running much of anything gui on it though, but it'd make a great mail server or low traffic web server.
I've got an old Packard Bell 486 sitting around too. I used to use that as my web server/irc server until I got a hand-me-down P200 to replace it.