Which version should we use on an old machine?

[Rick Stevens]

On Thu, 2006-08-03 at 12:36 -0400, Carl Reynolds wrote:
> My son was given a couple of old computers. They are Pentium 266MHz with 
> 32MB of RAM and 2.6GB hard drives. He wants to learn more about 
> networking and we have some extra LAN cards lying around here. So I 
> suggested that he clean the disks and try to load Linux on them to 
> start. Then he can set one of them up as a router.
> 
> What version of Linux should he use on these machines? It seems to me 
> that any recent version of Fedora Core would need more memory and more 
> disk space than is available with these machines, but I have never tried 
> to install a minimal version of Linux on a machine.
> 
> Do you have any suggestions of which version would be good for him to 
> start with?

Well, for the most part, Fedora and any fairly recent Red Hat is out of
the question.  It needs far more memory than he's got.  With 32MB, you
really pretty much in trouble with almost anything based on a 2.6
kernel.

Your best bet is probably Tiny Linux (http://tiny.seul.org/en/).

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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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-                    Do you know where _your_ towel is?              -
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