Basic Linux - a Distribution for Really Old Computers

Some of you might want to try Linux even on very old computers of "Prepentian" era of the early 1990's. Some of the distros I mentioned in my earlier post about lightweight distros can be used with a 486. Most of the modern distributions, however, require a Pentium.

Three are still some distributions meant for these dinosaurs. They might not be very useful for doing everyday computing like word processing or playing TuxRacer, but using them should be taken as learning experiences.

One of these truly minimalistic distributions is Basic Linux. Its download size is incredible 2.8 MB, so it could easily be downloaded even by those who still use a dialup connection.

Basic Linux is one of the few distributions that still can be installed on a 386. It requires 12 mb of RAM to run. Unfortunately my old 386 has only 2 mb RAM which makes it impossible for me to test this distribution. I'll return later to Basic Linux if I can get my hands on appropriate hardware!

3 comments:

zmjjmz said...

BasicLinux is pretty cool, and they have a bunch of old software packages to extend it with.
You can try to run it from DOS on that 386 by the way, but you'd probably want at least 4MB to do anything.

Mikko said...

My 386 has still some version of MS-DOS installed on it. Maybe I should dig it back to the daylight from the basement :-)

Mikko said...
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