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[Roy J. Tellason]

But, you might try:

http://www.goosee.com/puppy/

Mission Statement

• Puppy will easily install to USB, Zip or hard drive media.
• Booting from CD, Puppy will load totally into RAM so that the CD drive is then free for other purposes.
• Booting from CD, Puppy can save everything back to the CD, no need for a hard drive.
• Booting from USB, Puppy will greatly minimise writes, to extend the life of Flash devices indefinitely.
• Puppy will be extremely friendly for Linux newbies.
• Puppy will boot up and run extraordinarily fast.
• Puppy will have all the applications needed for daily use.
• Puppy will just work, no hassles.
• Puppy will breathe new life into old PCs

Obviously, some objectives have qualifications, for example, to load totally into RAM the PC must have either 128M RAM or failing that a swap partition.
...
The live-CD is about 50-60M, yet "every" application you need is there --
. . .
and v0.8 will ... work on older PCs, right down to a 486 with 32M RAM.
- - - -

Will it actually go on 8MB? I don't know, but it would seem worth a try.

I haven't checked it out lately,  but one thing that you might want to be aware of with Puppy is (at least in the version I looked at some years back) that it will install expecting that it's just gonna go in there and take what it finds,  if there's a hard drive it won't ask you which parition it may have,  it'll just take the HD,  and so forth.  Rather ill-behaved,  I thought at the time.

One other thing I want to add to my earlier post,  too:

I started messing with linux in 1999.  At that point I had my "main" machine (now my "server"),  which is a K6-200,  no great speed demon but it's doing the job I want it to nicely,  and I had my "test fixture",  a 486dx2/66 board that I had handy with 16M of ram in it.  In addition to the Slackware 4.0 that I was running at the time,  I tried several other distros in it,  each sharing a bit of the HD that I'd installed,  which wasn't at all large by today's standards,  probably a 1G drive or something.  I think this included Debian,  SuSE,  and some others besides Slackware.  I still have those CD-ROMs on hand here someplace.

One other thing that I thought seriously nifty was taking the drives out of the K6-200 box (probably around the time I did one of my MB swaps) and plugging them into the 486 test fixture and watching the system boot exactly the same way,  and run everything exactly the same way,  though of course noticeably slower.  Compare that to the way m$ stuff works,  when you swap a drive into a different machine and it totally freaks...   :-)

[Roy J. Tellason]

You'll need 32mb ram to run W95.

How do you figure that?  The one machine here that runs m$,  currently with 98 on it,  had 95 on it when we got it.  And 8MB.  Or maybe it was 16MB.  It's got 32MB in it now,  after I upgraded it,  and it still sucks.  :-)

I'm seriously thinking of replacing it with another machine,  probably that Compaq (that one is also a Compaq,  a P66!) that I mentioned elsewhere,  and making it dual-boot.  Only my w98 CDROM has taken a walk,  and hasn't come back yet...

Installing a console only linux, with a "word processor" like nano, or vi, or maybe even LaTeX, may be possible with 8mb ram, though--not sure what you'd need for a printer driver.  There must be a way.

A lot of that software always struck me as more trouble than it's worth...

You wouldn't be able to give a "modern" linux a try, but you should be able to use the computer.
Hehe--I wrote that,and then went and looked at the link Zoot gave--that would be what you need for what you want to do I think. Tiny Linux looks interesting, I may try to find an old machine to put it on.

Bet you don't have too much trouble finding one,  they're all over out there.

[ZooT_aLLures]

they're all over out there.

Yeah......I know*grin*

Monkey linux is another good small distribution if you can still find it, and I know for a fact it'll run even in GUI mode on a 386 with 8 megs.

There's a zillion of these tiny distributions floating around, but most are either CLI or they've been butchered so much for size that you can't just drop an old lib5 tgz file in them and expand and run it........

[irv]

they're all over out there.

What came into our local community 'thrift store' yesterday:

800 mhz Celeron, 64megs, 2 gig drive
PIII, 160 megs, 10 gig.
couple of older junkers with usable drives, cards, etc.
several monitors, mostly large screen.

This is typical. We test them and price a complete set (monitor, kbd, mouse, etc) at
$25 - $35, usually. These make good Linux boxes, and the proceeds go to local charities.

[snokrash257]

You'll need 32mb ram to run W95.

How do you figure that?  The one machine here that runs m$,  currently with 98 on it,  had 95 on it when we got it.  And 8MB.  Or maybe it was 16MB.  It's got 32MB in it now,  after I upgraded it,  and it still sucks.  :-)

I'm seriously thinking of replacing it with another machine,  probably that Compaq (that one is also a Compaq,  a P66!) that I mentioned elsewhere,  and making it dual-boot.  Only my w98 CDROM has taken a walk,  and hasn't come back yet...

I'm just going by what I remember--32MB min with 64MB suggested and ~500mb disk space needed.

Installing a console only linux, with a "word processor" like nano, or vi, or maybe even LaTeX, may be possible with 8mb ram, though--not sure what you'd need for a printer driver.  There must be a way.

A lot of that software always struck me as more trouble than it's worth...

Yes--tis true.  Even now a lot of software is more trouble than it's worth.

You wouldn't be able to give a "modern" linux a try, but you should be able to use the computer.
Hehe--I wrote that,and then went and looked at the link Zoot gave--that would be what you need for what you want to do I think. Tiny Linux looks interesting, I may try to find an old machine to put it on.

Bet you don't have too much trouble finding one,  they're all over out there.

Actually, I may have one.   Finding the time to play with it is the major problem.

[ZooT_aLLures]

If I remember correctly there was a bunch of conflicting info concerning win95 in that the "full registered version" on floppies (95a) only took about 50 mgs installed and offered internet explorer as a seperate option contained on three floppies, whereas the "upgrade" and OEM cd-rom versions required much more disk space and didn't offer internet explorer as an option.....

The 95B version included a bunch of other needless fluff including microsoft "PLUS!" and it was a bloated piece of shit that forced folks with old machines to buy both more memory and bigger hard disks.....

Anyways a long time ago I gave my girlfriend a 386 Compaq LTE lite/25E notebook with a docking station that had 8 megs of memory and a 120 meg hard disk and it ran 95a......even if very slowly....(my matching notebook ran minix 2.0 like a streak of lightening 8^P )