Maybe when I get a bit more time I'll try a uClibc based gentoo install and see how it runs with the latest Xorg and either fluxbox or XFCE.

Do it stage one 😁
Just to see how long it take to compile everything :p

I recommend either of these distros:

http://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/

http://www.micheleandreoli.it/mulinux/mulinux.html

Both are very simple, run fine on a 486, and can be installed from floppies.

feipoa wrote:

There seems to be no way around editing the config file for the graphics if you are going to use an X-Windows systems on an older distro, at least for my setup there wasn't.

It is inevitable even now, is it not?
http://xkcd.com/963/

Shodan486 wrote:

A little sidegoal though - just want to see how the 486 i'm using is able to handle various multimedia stuff in linux environment, playing mp3 plus browsing net etc...

Well, I can answer that for you right now. A 486 is just barely capable of playing back an MP3 since the calculation is floating-point heavy. The advent of the Pentium is what popularized MP3 because the floating-point performance was that much better. If you play an MP3 on a 486 and then try to do anything else, the audio will start to skip or pause.

There, I just saved you from having to install a unix distribution 😀 Although if you were still bent on doing so, FreeBSD 2.2.9 (ancient) is very snappy and runs on 386s and higher, and comes in a 1.44MB floppy distribution (although many newer versions have a dual-1.44MB floppy distro that you boot and then install the OS over the internet). If you need a link to 2.2.9 let me know.

IMO, the best reason to put a UNIX on one of these old machines is to have tools like dd, parted, rsync, wget, etc to back up and test various configurations. Like he said, I wouldn't want to use it for MP3s, etc, especially with VBR being standard these days.

MobyGamer wrote:

Shodan486 wrote:

A little sidegoal though - just want to see how the 486 i'm using is able to handle various multimedia stuff in linux environment, playing mp3 plus browsing net etc...

Well, I can answer that for you right now. A 486 is just barely capable of playing back an MP3 since the calculation is floating-point heavy. The advent of the Pentium is what popularized MP3 because the floating-point performance was that much better. If you play an MP3 on a 486 and then try to do anything else, the audio will start to skip or pause.

There, I just saved you from having to install a unix distribution 😀

Well, there are MP3 players for DOS. DOSAmp, for instance dates back to that era.

DOS, Linux, etc. aren't the limiting factor -- a 486 is. IIRC you need roughly a 486/100 to play back an MP3. Here's someone trying to get a 386-40 to play back an mp3 and he can only do so at 16KHz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jj97NXgHw4