Useing a 486 to make a webbox?
 

I have several old 486s laying around and was wonder if I could turn these into a Webbox or a NetBox, something to the effect of a machine connected to a LAN that its only perpose is to be able to Run a web browser and/or e-mail program and be able to shutdown. That’s it. And my real question is... "Is there a special distro or a Fav distro to do this?" keep in mind that it is a 486 with very limited power and if I could find one that is bootable from a CD or even better a floppy because I don't think these machines have hard drives in them (I ripped them out several years ago). I remember several years ago QNX had something just like this but since then has turned into a very robust and LARGE OS. Any thoughts would be appreciated. THANKS!

You could use them as dumb terminals. Check out the Linux Terminal Server Prodject. I don't have the email address right now. But you can find it with a search on the net. It work great and is easy to setup.

The web site Tom is referring is http://www.ltsp.org/ I've perused the site a little and started to read the EXCESSIVE wealth of information in the documentation, this maybe what I need. My only fear is what would happen to my poor under power linux server when the terminals start running applications remotely on the server. I'll find out when I try it, witch wont happen for some time. I have way too many projects on my plate at the moment.

The sever that I tested ltsp was a PII 400, 384 mb or ram and a 10/100 NIC. The server seemed to run slow on it's own when using KDE. But when logged in on a terminal it seemed a little faster. You could set the default window manager to WindowMaker, Flukbox or any light weight WM. This would help preformance. You could also setup one of the 486's to run severices like DNS and DHCP to take the wieght off of the server you want to run terminal services on. If your server has a 500 PIII and 256 plus megs of ram and setup not to boot to X. Then you should be alright with 3 to 5 terminals connected.
When I first setup ltsp it took me about 15 minutes after I downloaded the packages and read the how-to. It was really quite easy.

Sound like a nice little light wight service. However my current Linux server is a P2 200Mhz with 32Mbs of RAM and is currently acting as a router, webserver, FTP server, SQL server, SSH server, and anything else I can't remeber. Maybe when I get my new machine I'll turn my current one (P2 333 Mhz, 192Mbs RAM) into another linux server and try it out. But I've been saying for several years now.