One of these days I got to get around to testing that.

The GNU system is just to bloated for a 486 with 16 MB. The Linux kernel itself still works, but for the userland you have to go the embedded route. If you need TCP/IP services try OpenWRT.

Of course, even a single bash using glibc 2 is just to fat for that machine, takes almost half of that memory.

Just forget X11 on any pre-2000 machines.

I think shooting this machine with a pellet gun would be way more fun than trying to fit it with any half-way modern GNU/Linux distro.

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I had a P 200mmx with 16Mb of ram and a 2.1Gb hard disk running RH7 with gnome back in the day and I think I managed to run with a whopping 128mb of ram (don't quote me) and it ran away just fine. That machine shipped with Win 95, cost me £1400 if I mind right in 1997.
Anyway, I had this running right through to my PIII days when it was retired in favour of slackware on a PII server, one of which I still run today with slack 9.1

Anyway, point being I recently skipped the old Pentium machinee with RH7 on it but gave it one last boot before she went to the great server room in the sky and it was surprisingly snappy.

Drop it on someone's head and take their iPhone (dual core processor, 1gb ram, 8+gb storage, free with 2 year activation).

I would suggest Slackware 8.1. It will give you some shades of modernity it terms of file system layout and packages names, rc scripts stuff like that, and still probably be light enough for the box. The memory is going to be the pain point, but X with twm and keep yourself to one app at a time or so with you might just make it.

BTW, to the OP, I installed Slackware 11 on the 486 using a 20GB hard drive. I installed the drive in a removeable drive bay on my office system. I kept WFWG 3.11 on the first partition, which I sized to 512 MB because WFWG is too old to run from anywhere other than the first partition --- and the partition has to be in the first 1024 cyclinders or something like that. Linux systems do not have that limitation. I installed Slackware 11, edited fstab for the 486, installed grub for the boot loader, and reinstalled the drive in the 486 case.

Everything actually works. Just way too slow for anything useful other than a conversation piece. The NIC is a 1 Mb card too. Your Presario has more RAM and likely you can find a 20 GB drive like I did to tinker with Slackware. Be realistic and you'll have fun.

Try one of the earlier Puppy linuxes say 2 or 3. 2 Especially.

Thanks for all the suggestions and pointers. I've got plenty of ideas to go with now, if I ever find the free time...

It may come to that--we'll see.

For an old machine, why don't you just try a version of Slackware from that time? It would be like time travel

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