Hi,

I'm trying to get some old P1 and 486 (8 or 16 ram) to run just with SSH. I found this PicoBSD that fits on a floppy when i try to run it on any of the old
pcs it just keeps rebooting.
I did a google search and the only found one guy with the same problem but no answer.
Do any of you know any other distro that would fit in a floppy, recognise the NIC, and have at least SSH?
Or how could i build something from Suse 9.1 pro?
I'm yet learning my linux.

Thanks.

You should be able to install FreeBSD with 16 MB of ram... maybe even 8MB... The installer is the most ram intensive.. so once you finish the install, you can actually run FreeBSD on as little as 4MB or so of RAM...

If FreeBSD doesn't install right, check out NetBSD....I can't imagine you'd have any trouble installing NetBSD on a machine like that...

It's a pretty safe bet that you probably will NOT get anything related to SUSE 9.x on there...

Good luck..

If the machine has a CDROM (or you have one you can plug in just for the install), I'd say give NetBSD a shot. It'll run on almost anything, be it a brand new platform or a croaky old machine with a couple of megs of RAM.

These computers don't have an HD. I'm trying to get or build a floppy disk that would contain the minimum for me to ssh.
Thanks anyway for the answers. i will check NetBSD for other machines where i just want to put the strict minimum for Web/Mail acces.

Ok, i tryed NetBSD with no luck. Install went well but when i try to boot all i see is "press any key to reboot".
The PicoBSD was rebooting alone, this one at least asks to press a key. Shouldn't xxxBSD be compatible with a P1 166 with 16Mb Ram?

I almost gave up on this. I guess i'll go back to msdos and a telnet client. It's not as safe as SSH but at least that works.

Does anyone here know who to/where to find info on building a bootable floppy with the nic driver and ssh client with linux? i have suse 9.1 pro.

Thanks again for the responses given.