Is there a way I could get linux running on a old 386 (16mhz) if it only has a 5 inch floppy drive and a 50 meg hardrive?

Where there is a will there is a way, I suppose :D

I've had suse and red hat on 486s with 8mb ram, they worked but it wasnt pretty. They do make a good home firewall but I wouldnt recomend them for much of anything else....

Good Luck! You have alot more guts than I do...

Probably not worth a try.

You could get a decent secondhand Pentium PC around $50. I got a couple in my garage..:)

If you wanted to - easily:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Operating_Systems/Linux/Distributions/Tiny/Floppy_Sized/

... but as freva already pointed out, you could easily get a half decent pentium to run it on for a few bucks.

Years ago, I installed slackware on a 386 with 40 Megs of hard drive. It had 4 megs of ram. You will be able to install the essential parts, but not all the optional software. Also leave out the sources and probably most of the man pages.

You will also have to use the console shell, running X will grind your hard drives with all the swapping.

You can forget about the newer releases. Their installation requires up to 1GB of swap space. .......

You probably want to think of something like PicoBSD or a floppy router version of the Linux kernel.

It'll be almost impossible to run a 2.x Linux kernel on anything that old, but like someone mentioned, you can buy Pentiums with 128MB of RAM for like $100.

You probably have a specific purpose in mind, like building an ethernet router/firewall with a machine that small. It definitely works and can be done.

Try doing a good search on PicoBSD and router -- its a very easy solution.

Rik

I agree that it certainly can be done, but whether you should or not depends on what you want this thing to do. Acting as a firewall, router, and/or gateway, it might be too slow for this purpose. If logging is involved, an old hard drive (or worse, a floppy) would definately prove to be a slow-down (logging is usually done synchronously).

I would imagine a 386 simply doesn't have the horsepower to forward packets at a fast enough speed -- you would probably introduce a lot of unnecessary latency. If you're talking about a dialup connection, it's probably fine, but for anything faster it would not be suitable.

In general, though, any Pentium class machine would probably be able to do this with no problems. Something like a P133 with 32 Megs would be suitable for this purpose (with no X, Apache, or anything fancy).

...a 386 is able to forward packets at wirespeed at 10Mb/s. That is really not a lot of data to forward.

.. If you want to route/forward/filter at 100Mb/s a Pentium is required.

The concern about the HDs is an interesting point, but you can always set your disk writes to be asynchronous or buffered in general. The biggest problem with using media vs solid state in a router is that if the HD crashes your router is dead.

I don't remember how long a 386 took to reboot, but I can't imagine its pretty.

Rik