I would like to enter into the Linux arena by installing a distribution on a system with a 33 Mhz486DX chip, 16Mb ram, and a 163 Mb hard drive. A 3 1/4 floppy is available as well as access to AOL, and Win 3.1 is currently installed. Is there a distribution that can be installed on a system of this limited capability?
Thanks

Any i386 distro will install but with only 163mb of hard disk you'll have to be carefull about what packages you choose and avoid gnome and kde. If you want a GUI you'll have to install one of the light weight window managers.

To Aussie,
Thanks. Do you have the names (and addresses) of distributions that I might look at seriously?

Almost any distro apart from mandrake does i386, mandrake do i586 which means you need a pentium or better. Have a look at Distro Watch there is lots of info on almost all linux distro's there, you should be able to find one that has what you want/need.

a distro not on that distrowatch page is tiny linux.. for i386 and up.. and it can be fairly small install too.. hince the name.
go here: http://tiny.seul.org/

I've played with Tiny before... and its not exactly for the newer to Linux crowd. We put it on a 33Mhz 386 8Meg RAM. It ran fine, but was a beast to configure. You might just want to go for an older slackware that actually came on a pile of 3.5s. All of these older versions are archived at the Slack site. 3.x or 4.x should be alright, just as long as you get something in the 2.x kernel family.

16 Meg of ram is going to be too little for either an ftp or nfs mount to a remote site with a newer distro, so dialing in to do a remote install is probably out.

Either way, good luck with the old machine.

Cheers,

Finegan

What do you mean when you say 16 megs of ram is going to be too little?
I've got a server with only 16 megs of ram and it works fine for all that. Not that it's fast but I can have several ftp connections open and still have a web server running and many other things.

Sorry if I was unclear, running a machine on 16 Megs is easy, I administer a 486 webserver that has just that, but doing a remote installation of the OS through a dial-up with that little RAM, especially with the newer distro's is probably going to be too tough to bother with. For instance, RH7.0 recently refused to let me try and ftp install onto a p75 16Meg laptop from another machine on my home LAN with the install box's swap already activated.
Go figure though, Slackware went on there from NFS just fine.

-Cheers,

Finegan