UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I pulled out my old 386 from the garage and dusted it off, and now i want to install unix on it. The 386 however only has a 104mb HD, and has NO cd rom support. Which if any version of unix would best suite this box? Is installing with floppies my only option?

A 386 with only 104MB HD and no CD-ROM support...you would be hard pushed to find *nix distribution that could install on such a system.

Regards.

Old 386s are not for today's modern day operating systems and applications. Personally, I throw Pentiums under 300 MHZ in the trash can (except notebooks). The same for HDs under 5 GB. Good, fast hardware is so cheap, why waste your time on worthless hardware? Use a Pentium at a minumum with a few Gigs of space, would be my bare minimum.

<EM>
Note:
Yes, I know PxT does not like me to throw these in the trash for environmental reasons. However, these are technical discussions, not environmental ones Environmental discussions reserved for off-forum discussion.</EM>

The fact of the matter is that old 386s are worth less than the shipping charges. I travel often to less developed countries; people don't use 386 technology there either !

FreeBSD can work on a 386 but you really need to upgrade the HD to >500Megs and a cheap CD drive if possible.



You can find more info about FreeBSD at:



http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...faq/index.html








Andy Hibbins

i was thinking of FreeBSD for a old computer system i am going to build out of all the parts lying round my room.
I could get a,
AMD K-6 200mz,
4.5gb hard disk,
20x CD-ROM,
floppy
from the parts in my room would this be enough to run it successfully.

FreeBSD should run pretty well on a AMD K-6 200, make sure you've got a decent amount of RAM (24Megs min)

I've got Linux running on a P60, 32Megs of RAM, 1GB HD.
It's acting as a internet gateway at home and also provides email (SMTP,IMAP4,POP3), ipchains firewall, caching nameserver etc.

Andy Hibbins

i've got 64 for it - It was a very good computer at the time