OK , first a little background : DOS-Veteran , Linux-Dabbler , Windows-Despiser(Quelle surpise!).
And now , I want to pick up on BSD as well.

For starters:
Would this machine be able to run a BSD?
If so ; Which release would be best , and would I be able to use a GUI with it?
Note: I might be able to upgrade the memory to 16MB , but I still have to check that.

My other question:
How does the partition-naming convention of BSD relate to the Linux-native one?
I attempted to install FreeBSD 5.1 on my current main machine but I bailed out at the point where the installation prompted for the assignment of disk/partition-use ;
I couldn't figure out what partition to assign for BSD , since the info presented was completely different from what I'm used to.
To me it looked like it saw all my different ext3-partitions as one big one.
Since I'm triple-booting three different Linux-flavours and don't want to risk loosing them , could any of you *BSD-users tell me how to go from there without blasting my current installations?

I seem to remember that the various sundary BSDs think Linux partitions are one big blob. You have to inform *BSD of the offset values to get them to show up distinctly.

You know, I was going to write a whole explanation from memory, but why don't you just go to the source? http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...all-steps.html

One thing you'll find quite shocking as you switch from Linux to BSD is that, *gasp*, important things are actually documented, and quite well too! This means you'll find very useful guides on www.FreeBSD.org (use the Handbook as a constant reference), on www.OpenBSD.org (I actually mirror a local copy because I use it so often), and www.NetBSD.org.

Since partitioning is a little different in both OpenBSD and NetBSD, here are their guides as well:
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq4.html#Install
http://www.netbsd.org/guide/en/chap-inst.html#id2531558

In my experience, all three of the "well known" BSDs are very compact and also functional in their default install. It's unlikely that you'll get good X performance out of the system you mention. I'd hold off for more RAM before attempting. Besides, X itself eats up a fair chunk of disk space and you want some left to do things!

Thanks for the info and the links.
Off to do some reading.