[Techtalk] Two Totally off-the wall Questions

[Caitlyn Martin]

Hi,
> 
> Red Hat 7.2 doesn't install on machines with < 16 MB RAM as far as my
> housemates and I could tell, so if you want a recent Linux distro you
> might have to skip Red Hat.

Actually, it won't install on anything less than 32MB of RAM.  That's true of Red Hat 7.1 as well.  Ditto recent releases of Mandrake and Caldera.
> 
> One of our firewalls was a 486-66 with 4MB RAM running Slackware 4,0, it
> did just fine. Just never try and compile anything on it, because gcc
> will swap itself out of RAM :-)
> 
> I'd suggest Debian these days on a box with < 1 GB disk space, as unlike
> Red Hat and SuSE (the only other distros I've installed), it's really
> easy to say, 'OK, I want a kernel, I want bash, I want ssh, I want
> firewalling, and THAT'S IT."

Vector Linux ( http://www.vectorlinux.com ) also is good for a small installation.  It's Slackware based, and has Pentium optimized and non Pentium builds last I checked.  They assume small space and low resources and let you add what you want for bigger systems.  There hasn;t been a new release in a while, and I hope it's still being developed.

All the best,
Caity