4.86GB HDD a GUI works too... netinst on my IBM T20 had a few WM\DEs over the years now I keep it CLI only; currently, Debian 9!

Puppy was a sweet idea too or: https://distrowatch.com/search.php?c...=Old+Computers

FredGSanford,
I'm thinking about trying that. Thanks for sharing!

wpeckham,
CentOS minimal might do it but nowadays it might be too big for this machine.
I decided to use Tiny Core as a live CD and I love it!

fatmac,
LinuxBBQ will be next if Tiny Core does not work out.

jamison20000e,
THANKS A LOT!!

BW-userx,
I never heard of void linux but im going to give it a try. Thanks!

wpeckham,
I only want to use it for irssi, lynx, mutt, and typespeed(for fun)
Thats it. Very minimal.

jefro,
SuseStudio sounds interesting! And your right, everyone gave me excellent suggestions and I have narrowed it down.

So far I have tried puppy, antix, slackware minimal, kolibri os, netbsd, and none of them didn't load right without lots of configuration.

Tiny Core...Tiny Core
has done it for me. It works great! Not much config needs to be done and pretty much everything works out of the box for this old 380XD.

Tiny Core for now is my choice but I have some more distro's to try out before I make that conclusion but im pretty dead set on it.

If down the line you feel adventurous and want your own distro: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/download.html ;-)

that is only if you have a spare PC or laptop MO because of compile time. SO you can still have a PC or LAPTOP to play on. Other then that > go for it!

1 members found this post helpful.

Or: phone, tablet, single board PC &*(.com ) not only a must for s!

what you talking bout Willis? tablet ?? I got a crappy 30$ tablet I can experiment with. AS long as I don't completely lose it. I know that CPU is no intel, it is a cheep Chinese one. tell me more..

It can DuckDuckGo your main PC out of

[screencast]ZBAijg5Betw[/screencast]

I decided to ditch Tiny Core because of compile issues.

I am going back to Slackware and I'm happy again. It feels like home. I was finally able to get Slackware installed on this IBM 380XD with a 6gb hdd!! Irssi is also working great.

For those of you who own a similar machine circa 1998. Make sure you boot the huge.s kernel in the beginning and all you have to do is add the boot flag to /dev/sda1. Dont worry about creating a swap partition because you have limited space anyway.

So, at the step where you use fdisk make sure to type 'a' and select the first sda1 partition. That will create the boot flag which is very important! You usually don't have to with newer machines though.

My conclusion is that Slackware should be your real choice for small machines no matter how small they are.

1 members found this post helpful.

Whatever floats your boot, at only 6Gb I'd stick to one OS or get a SSD?