The RULE Project [LWN.net]

The RULE Project

Posted May 27, 2004 20:06 UTC (Thu) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455)
Parent article: The RULE Project

I have to question the utility of this project. While I am all for using
older hardware, I'm not sure that there is that much old hardware that
meets even the low specs that they seem to be aiming for. I have been
trying to get linux on my old 486 laptop for a while and I cannot get
anything to run on it. The catch: it only has 4 MB.

I have searched around and most lowmem linux projects, like this one,
think that extreme lowmem is a 486 with 8MB. It seems to me that if you
have a 486 sitting around, unless it was a high end machine when you
bought it, it probably only has 4MB, not 8MB, not 16MB and certainly not
32MB! Yes, memory is cheap, but try getting memory for a 486, even
better, try getting memory for a 486 laptop! :)

Nevertheless, I wish them luck.

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The RULE Project

Posted May 28, 2004 3:48 UTC (Fri) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

Wow. You've been to Africa, into the poorer nations and seen their P4's and AMD64's, eh?

But seriously, I have a 16MB Pentium 100Mhz laptop I'm going to give it a try on. To bad Red Hat
doesn't support a lightweight install option as part of their base.

4M linuxes

Posted May 28, 2004 5:22 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

I have searched around and most lowmem linux projects, like this one, think that extreme lowmem is a 486 with 8MB.

Have you checked BasicLinux? Homepage: http://www.volny.cz/basiclinux/

The "DOS version" of the current release claims:
Minimum requirements
Intel 386 or compatible
3 mb RAM
DOS (or Windows 95/98 in DOS mode)

This version of the distribution is unzipped onto a DOS partition. (I have not tried this version, but have run prior BasicLinuxes in slightly bigger machines and they have generally delivered their promises).

ZipSlack (a Slackware variant) also claims to run in 4M.