First post, by 386SX
Hi,
lately I'm testing and trying to downgrade as much as possible my main desktop pc for mail,office,web,music/multimedia just for the quest to see how oldest hardware could still live nowdays beside any limitations you're going to accept to live with it even if anything would be almost only text or simplest gui as win95.
I built a Pentium2 400 machine with 512MB and seen that with linux you can have an usable machine with a light graphic interface, lightest browsers and apps and it's still a "modern" config ifwe consider it running a heavy modern kernel (2018 3.x based) and modern patches and support on i586/x86 architecture. Obviously such cpu doesn't have SSE so many new heavy apps did not run without (I could use a P3 500 as I tried) but I'd like to go to the lowest possible config so I was thinking to try building a modern oriented machine using my Intel DX4-100 with 64MB ram and with PCI on SIS496 chipset I have.
At this level I can't use a Debian linux distro cause i486 support was dropped long time ago and the gui itself would be too heavy even the lxde one I think, even with a modern 2D gpu acceleration.
I wanted to try using Linux cause maybe I can have a more modern kernel/patches/hw drivers/support and still using a PCI usb controller and PCI wireless cards.
I'd like to ask your opinions of which o.s. and apps I can try using with it. I considered Freedos and oldest windows but they are probably too much old and unsupported to use it nowdays so maybe some optimized distributions of linux with lightest possible gui? Or staying to a terminal based distribution without gui? I've seen for example Gentoo distribution has i486 support but installation is a bit difficult and need to try.
Did anyone of you tried some project like this before?
Thank