Re: 386--which Linux?

From: Randy Crawford (joe_at_burgershack.com)
Date: 03/06/04 

Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 09:06:40 GMT

Walter Mautner wrote:
> Happy Thoughts wrote:
>
>
>>Don't laugh! I have an old...very old...Packard Bell 386/20 that I'm
>>toying with the idea of installing Linux on. It's been so long since
>>I've booted it up (7 or 8 years), that I don't really recall offhand
>>what its specs are.
>
>
> And you have not tried to boot it up once before asking here?
> Maybe there has been a mouse nesting inside, eating up one or the other
> cable ... or you risk a dust explosion when turning the thing on again ;-)
> Or the fan/harddrive bearings are rusty and your drives won't spin up at
> all.
> In fact, you can try a non-gui linux booting from floppies, but no recent
> mainstream distribution (recommended for beginners) will run on that
> dinosaur.

I wouldn't do it either. You'll want an IDE-ATAPI CDROM and at least 2
GB of disk, neither of which will be supported by that old BIOS.

I'd suggest spending $150 for a new motherboard with at least 256MB RAM,
a 1GHz+ CPU, 20+ GB disk, and a new CDROM and trying again.

     Randy 

-- 
Randy Crawford   http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~rand   rand AT rice DOT edu

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