[Techtalk] Two Totally off-the wall Questions

[Mary Gardiner]

On Tue, Feb 12, 2002 at 11:00:56PM +0000, Conor Daly wrote:
>On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 09:59:26PM -0500 or so it is rumoured
>hereabouts, wny-tc at juno.com thought:
> > 2 - I have inherited an old IBM Thinkpad 350 from one of my
> > brothers.  It's a 486-33/12MB RAM/850MB HD.  Is there any chance of
> > being able to run any sort of tiny Linux installation on that
> > machine?
> 
> Home Firewall is a 486-66DX 32Mb / 240Mb  Runs RH6.2 with a custom
> kernel and its only responsibility is to handle and firewall the
> internet connection.  No X, no apps, as little as possible installed
> but quite happy.

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.

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."

All that will fit into well under the amount of disk space you have, and
the processor speed and RAM are more than enough.

-Mary.

-- 
Mary Gardiner
<mary at puzzling.org>