Could anyone explain to me what minix is??? And im looking for a distro that will run on a 486.

Cheers

minix was the os that linux was based from. you can find some old distros in oldlinux.org. you can also try the old versions of slackware.

Yup, it's an old distro.
For a 486 you can find a lot of distros. I made my 286 run with a unix system, and it had only 2mb of ram . I assume you have more, and eventually a cd-drive as well.
You should google it with the requirements, and see what you find. Also look here:
http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/...ons/Tiny/?il=1
I found it somehow useful...

MINIX

<operating system> /MIN-ix/ A small operating system that is
very similar to UNIX. MINIX was written for educational
purposes by Prof. Andrew S. Tanenbaum of Vrije
Universiteit, Amsterdam.

MINIX has been written from scratch and contains no AT&ampT code
-- neither in the kernel, the compiler, the utilities, nor
the libraries. Although copyrighted by Prentice-Hall, all
sources, binaries and documentation can be obtained via
Internet for educational or research purposes.

Current versions as of 1996-11-15:

MINIX 2.0 - Intel CPUs from Intel 8088 to Pentium

MINIX 1.5 - Intel, Macintosh (MacMinix), Amiga, Atari
ST, Sun SPARC.

Home (http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html).

(1997-06-16)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix

Hope I'm not simplifying too much: Minix as I understand it gave Linus at least one reason for developing something that subsequently turned into Linux. Not that Minix was seen as no good, but rather that Linus wanted to have something advanced that would run on his (then) very modern 386 box at the time. Meanwhile, Minix has been developed a lot further and is quite different from what linus saw almost 15 years ago. I personally would not want to use it on a desktop.

If you are looking for something to run on a 486 or even a 386 or 286, you could go to the www.distrowatch.com website and search for distributions for "old computers". A list will be produced, and you will see more than plenty of distros to choose from.

My personal choice for a 486 might include Open-BSD, or Puppy Linux, or even Open Solaris, but maybe Feather Linux, or Damn Small Linux. Its up to you depending on what you want your box to do, how good you want it to work, and how much time you are willing to invest learning...
Helmut

Minux 1.0 (1987) is inherited from Minix (pre-1985?) which is inherited from UNIX Time-Sharing System Seventh Edition (v7) (January 1979) which is inherited from v6,v5,v4,v3,v2,v1 (3rd november 1971) which is inherited from UNICS (1969) which is inherited from woodstock (15-18 August 1969)

What Is MINIX 3?
MINIX 3 is a new open-source operating system designed to be highly reliable, flexible, and secure. It is loosely based somewhat on previous versions of MINIX, but is fundamentally different in many key ways. MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability.

http://www.minix3.org/

As the folk lore goes ( From the brief histories of unix from many a learn unix/cli/bash books)

Linus decided to develop his own operating system, to help people learn how they worked and to further his own knowledge, it seems to go that the licence minix used was far to restrictive for free distribution, and maybe some factors the the operating system where too ( that i seriously doubt being unix). Dont take that as fact look into it yourself have a look round http://www.oldlinux.org. Linux will scale down to that level, it was written for earlier hardware so you'll be fine, i think modern distros will work there. Or go find some all slackware