I have decided to leave my current comp configged with win 98 for my wife. I now want to buy an older used system to install linux to and learn it all. What is the "oldest" comp. I can get any with. Basically I'm looking at several different PII models.

If you are looking at PII's then you're all set. Just get a good enough amount of RAM. That goes without saying with any computer though. In my opinion, I wouldn't go below a P166 even though you can do it. You just lose alot of performance.

486 DX-2 66 w 16MB RAM (text mode with telnet) GUI if possible?

Yes, I know I am cheap! But we just require machines w/ a robust OS and FREE (hence Linux) and offer only telnet sessions. We are replacing our dumb terminals with PCs unfortunately we do not have the budget that one would wish for. This is the best config I can salvage from the computer (office) depot.

I am using RH7.1 distribution. I use my home PC to install the HDDs- my config is a Celeron 850 with 256Mb ram. The harddisks are between 420MB and 540MB! Tight huh... therefore I ditched the GUI. It works fine on my machine but when I put the HDD back into the original machines it wont boot up! I have installed with it GUI Kde and text mode but both setup fails....

Loading linux .......
Uncompressing Linux.. Ok, booting the kernel. [halts]

Any advise?

If anyone out there with Pentium machines would like to get rid of please feel free to email me

andy.wong@custompress.com.au


Cheers!

Andy

386 I think....


a p2 with at least 64MB RAM (go for 128-256mb, it's cheap), will make a great Linux box.....

I think Linux can run on any box it is really upto how technical you are feeling, obviously the new versions like rehat 7.2 will need 1Gb of hard disk but linux will run on 486's and p75's only problem I have found is getting things like gnome (GUI environment) to run on my p133 as the graphics card cannot be probed. So i will say this if you know how to use linux from shell only without the gui then you could bring all those old machines sitting in your attic or office rubbish bins back to life, I have worked in so many companies and seen them throw out old p100's because they are too slow, it all depends what you will use the box for, i think for learning linux it is probably best to get something like a p266 with at least 64mb of ram and a well known AGP graphics card and 2GB hard disk as with this set-up you can run most applications and run a GUI environment without too much hassle. As a guideline here are some examples:

ADSL internet / small LAN Router - 486 , 8mb ram FDD (NO hard disk) linux on a floppy disc

Small web server - 486 32mb ram 750mb hard disk redhat 6

Mail server - p150 64mb ram 5 Gb hard disk redhat 6

Workstation - p266 64 - 512mb ram 5gb hard disk latest linux distribution
As for me I am building a athlon p1.3Ghz box with 768 mb ram and 32mb ati graphics for linux 7.2 40gb h/d purely as a learning tool/webserver/database server/an run windows ontop of linux!!!!!
check out google groups for info as well
D.Y.O.R !!!

And it still can,but as a newbie you would be hard pressed to get a modern "fancy pants" distro to run on a machine with 16 megs. Slack is probably your best bet.
I understand that the minimum cpu is 386, and the minimum ram is 4 with 8 temporarily for the install process. The big HURDle in most cases is the installer... slack has the most bare bone installer so I would suspect that it is the most likely to install on a small footprint machine.

as an aside, net bsd is right up there with slack in it's bare bone-ed-ness.