Is there a "good" distribution (preferaby small so it can be downloaded) that can be installed (and will run) on an i486 with only 4MB RAM???

I tried installing Slackware 3.9, it didn't work quite like it should have had to create a special boot and root disk because of the lack of memory, but after installation I couldn't get everyting working... after some "do it yourself" work I've got the kernel and stuff on the harddisk, but its only failing LILO... and after booting with a bootfloppy it complains about the abcense of /etc/fstab or /etc/mtab

So if there's an easyer way of installing Linux on that machine I would be very happy....

You can check out http://www.thinlinux.org , or even tiny linux at http://tiny.seul.org
There is peanut linux as well which is at http://metalab.unc.edu/peanut

Those are the smallest distro's I know of.
As far as I know though, most of the main Distro's will work, just alot of configuring, and with 4mb of RAM, I wouldn't recommend trying to use X windows.

Good Luck.

ZipSlack should also work.

I tried all of the above... most of them require a minimum of 8MB of RAM to install...

But I think I've found the answer somewhere else... most distributions do run on 4MB, its only that the installation procedure with boot- and rootdisks mostly require a minimum of 8MB because of RAM disks...
So one solotion mentioned somewhere was, install your harddisk in a machine with more memory, install Linux, and move the harddisk back to the low memory machine...

And there's one ditribution I can't seem to find, SmallLinux should be available on http://smalllinux.netpedia.net but that website has Restricted Access, anybody know how to find it???

Don't know if you are still looking for smalllinux but here it is:
http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/howto.html
Down loaded it today and the floppies are working fine on an
old 386, now I'm trying to put it on the hardrive. No cdrom.