Distros for ancient laptops
 

I am thinking of trying to install Linux on an ancient 486 Toshiba laptop with 8MB RAM. Is there any chance of getting X working? What distros are likely to be most friendly to antique laptops? Or is this just a dumb idea?

jim

You could try Zipslack from Slackware and install the iceWM for
your X ! I would imaged it will take quite a bit of fiddling to do it ?

But to be quite honist even if you get it to work it will be very slow as
really 16Mb Ram is the bare min. and 32Mb Ram is the recomended min.

I once Loaded an older version of ZipSlack and then added X
to the base install on an AMD 386dx40 desktop (the fastest 386
there ever was) the 386 had 8 Mb of 30 pin Ram and a 1 Mb
video card and it took several mins just to open iceWM.

I also once installed an older vers of Peanut-Linux on the same
machine using iceWM. Again it was terrably terrably slow.

There are other light weight X window managers you could try
instead of iceWM - but they tend to be not very user friendly ??