/begin rant/ Back in the good old days you could get a decent linux system running on a 386 with 8megs of RAM and 250MB of HDD.
Show me a 386 with 8megs of RAM and a 250mb HDD. In the year and a half I've been at my job, the lowest specced machine I have seen was a Pentium 75. I have thrown out/found new homes for about two dozen Pentium 2/Cyrix class machines. Hell, if you're that desperate for computing power, I have a P2-400 machine I can donate to you, or a Celeron 500 motherboard/PSU combo. Hell, there's someone on Trade Me right now with a 486SX33 for $0.50. Buy it and move on. Just because Linux can run on a 386 doesn't mean it -should-. Now, lets say for a second that you absolutely have to run Linux on a 386. Start at http://dilbert.physast.uga.edu/~andy/minilinux.html. You can run it off a floppy disc if you like. Just because you expect a modern OS to run on 15 year old hardware doesn't mean you have to hold everyone back!
I like the fact that debian is holding back on the idea of jumping forward and not trying to be one step ahead of mickysoft. What this does is allows you make a fairly good system with what ever you have lying around, i.e. 286, 386 & 486 type systems.
Linux does not and has never worked on a 286. I would expect Woody to install on a 486 (remember that it still uses the 2.2 kernel by default). Do a base install and nothing else.
People need to drop the "update and upgrade for the sake of it" attitude, and like me, brake away from the GUI dependency.
There is no gui dependency. You can install as little or as much as you need; if you don't need X on your gateway router, don't put it there. Snapgear routers run Linux on what is probably an embedded 486/K5 processor; you can run that on
In fact, I would like to challenge the Fedora team to make a distro that would work on the specs I have mentioned above as THAT WOULD be a kick in the pants for mickysoft <grin>.
The name of the company is "Microsoft". If you want people to have any respect for Linux, people like you need to make a conscious effort to drop the little slights against them. There are plenty of OS's that will work on the specs you mention above. Before Windows 3.0 there was a product called GeoWorks Ensemble. Look at the gallery at http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interfaces/geos/geoworks/gwe2. It ran on a 286 and is still commercially available, and will probably still run on a 286. The Fedora team are not targeting throwaway hardware, they are targeting a usable desktop environment for modern tasks on modern hardware. If you don't have much RAM but still want modern performance, get a smaller X server, use FluxBox or XFCE instead of GNOME or KDE etc, and you're there. Don't complain about progress, just ignore it. Linux is all about that choice. You have the source, go rip out all the stuff you don't want. However, it doesn't do a lot of things you might like to do these days; you know, web, email etc. If you don't care, keep running it. If you do care, you might just have to upgrade. What, no Doom 3 on my XT? Craig