With a little web research squared away my issues with arch arm/x86 and the web servers. The answer was there all along, but it took some experience with arch to realize what was done.
Put old machines back to work as starter systems.
Yes Virginia, Slackware does run on a Pentium I with 256 meg ram.
# uname -a
Linux slacky 3.10.17 #2 Wed Oct 23 17:46:52 CDT 2013 i586 Pentium MMX GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
root@slacky:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor...
