I have an old 486 computer that runs just fine… Win98SE, but for browsing the web it’s adequate, if not exceptional. I can’t use it for much else; no PCI bus, no USB ports… it’s a blast from the past.
I’m toying with the idea of standing up a Linux box. What flavor/version would run on such a dinosaur?
Any version of Linux should do, but you probably want one without a graphical setup program.
While any version should work, due to extremely unfortunate bloatware in Linux, newer mainstream distributions are just huge and many programs are both large and slow. Sad, sad, sad.
In the Redhat sequence, I would recommend maxing out at the 5.x level. But there have been so many security patches for programs in that release since, you either face a lot of recompile patching or avoid directly connecting it to the Net.
Plan on sticking with good old Xwindows instead of the KDE, etc. type interfaces. (Which I don’t like anyway, so no real loss.)
(I first ran Linux on a 386/40 with 8Meg and it was amazing fast. Ah, the good old days.)
A 486 can run a graphical interface just fine, but it would run faster with a simpler one (WindowMaker or IceWM instead of the latest KDE or Enlightenment). My 586 (first-generation Pentium) laptop runs very well with WindowMaker but is too slow to run GNOME comfortably. If your machine can run Win98 at a good speed (no big slowdowns, etc.) it should do just about as well.
Of course, doing a lot of graphics work in The GIMP is going to eat up clock cycles faster than anything. I’d advise against that. 
But for web-surfing, email, word-processing, and other general office-y tasks, a 486 should be more than up to the task. Picking a good web browser is important: Mozilla is slow even on fast CPUs. Konqueror, KDE’s default browser, would probably be about as bad on an older machine. Opera tends to be noticeably faster than almost anything else I’ve used (aside from the text-only lynx), so that might be something to download (I don’t think any distros ship with it). But it doesn’t cost anything to play the field in browsers. Maybe you’ll find something I’ve missed.
Other than that, everything should work fine no matter what distro you pick. Unlike Micrsoft, Linux has no reason to make you need to upgrade your hardware every time you upgrade your software. A 486 should be enough for a reasonably modern Linux distro.
I’ve run slackware ever since the days when slackware was just about the only distribution you could get, and I’ve stuck with it just because I’m used to it. I’ve played around with some of the other distributions and while they are arguably easier to install, they don’t seem to be as customizable. If I were doing it, I’d use slackware just because you can more easily choose only the things you need, and I’m betting on your 486 that disk space will be rather limited.
I agree with the others about using one of the simpler versions of x windows. It will work fine for web browsing and e-mail type things, and won’t do all that bad at word processing and other not so cpu intensive tasks also.
Yep, I’d recommend Slackware myself - if you’ve got a working Linux box right now, or CD-burning software on your windows box, you can even burn a customized (but non-bootable 
) istall CD without even the minimal cruft in Slackware. Plus, it come with Lynx and Links (take that, Derleth), at least in recent releases. Much texty goodness. However, if you’re new to Linux, Slackware may not be the optimal distriution to start with. since it tends to assume that you know what you’re doing, instead of trying to do things for you. This is good, but not the easiest thing to handle, though you’ll certainly learn from it.
A couple years ago I ran a web server using Slackware on a 386/40 with 8 megs of RAM and a 500 MB hard drive. Highest uptime was 112 days.
It was plenty fast enough for doing telnet and IRC, kinda slow for serving web pages, and recompiling the kernel took all day.
Maybe you want to look at debian, though I have no idea what browsers it come with.
Slackware. I’ve got Slackware 3.2 still running on my 486 DX100 (8MB RAM, 850 MB HDD) since late 1997. It is hella slow when you run X (don’t even bother running Netscape/Mozilla), so I spend most of my time in text console mode.
I’m intrigued by the mentions of Slackware, and while I’m a complete Linux newbie, I’m not a complete Unix newbie – although my last experience with Unix was back in 82-83.
I’ll try it!