It was thus said that the Great Chris M once stated:
Fresh out of
'386s, would an "XT-286" do?
"Clasic" Linux (and there I am making an assumption)
won't run on a '286. Sure there are newer ports that
will I guess, but that's not what you're interested in
evidently. There are of course other flavuz of NIX
that'll run on that...but you're likely not interested
in them either :).
Some people (possibly many) complain about how
bloated Linux is these days. Is it possible to get by
on an older distro (w/the net being what it is these
days)? Features you can do w/o, but w/o security and
"fresh" source code might not be such a good idea.
My home system is a 160MHz AMD/586 (a glorified 486) with 32M RAM and
several gigs of harddrive space [1] running RedHat 5.2 and it's still
usable. Of course, I have upgraded some of the more critical packages (like
ssh) from source, and I'm running stuff like Postfix and Apache (1.3---2.0
is a bit of a hog to tell the truth).
I use it for development and maintaining my website [2] using XSLT. Okay,
browsing the web is a bit iffy these days (I have a Mac for that) but
everything else (like email [4]) it's fine.
-spc (Oh, and run X on it ... )
[1] I'd check, but I'm currently without DSL at the house [3].
[2]
http://www.conman.org/
[3] Curse BellSouth.
[4] Well, it *was* handling email until I lost DSL [1].