75Mhz, 16 MB of RAM.... What to do?

**diablo75** · June 18th, 2008

I have a friend who is trying to breath some life back into an old Packard Bell Axcel 472CD PC. It has a 75 Mhz Pentium with 16 MB of RAM. My hope was to run Damn Small Linux on it, but the BIOS doesn't support CD-ROM booting, only allowing either the Floppy or Hard Drive as the only devices for that.

We're wanting to:

1. Wipe the Hard Drive.
2. Put some form of Linux in place of Windows 3.11.

What can be done?

**bubba_169** · June 18th, 2008

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/install_from_floppy.html
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/network-install.html

These might be what you're looking for...

**zmjjmz** · June 18th, 2008

Google these
Smart Boot Manager
BasicLinux (I'll give you this link www.basiclinux.com.ru)
I know it may seem impossible, but...
Damn Small is actually too much for that thing. You'll really prefer BasicLinux.

EDIT: Basiclinux fits on 2 floppies, so you won't need Smart Boot Manager.

**LaRoza** · June 18th, 2008

Try FreeDOS + OpenGEM?

**zmjjmz** · June 18th, 2008

Too little for this, but...
LaRoza, how well do you think that would run on 3MB RAM?

**LaRoza** · June 18th, 2008

Originally Posted by zmjjmz

LaRoza, how well do you think that would run on 3MB RAM?

I have no idea, sorry. I haven't had a chance to play with a computer that low spec.

FreeDOS is like DOS, so it could run that (it is running DOS now), and the other is just a GUI like WINDOWS.EXE.

**init1** · June 19th, 2008

Originally Posted by cmay

that i should have written as finds the 8mb ram.

i also forgot to mention the hard disk is less than 800 mb
so minix doesnt need that much to run .

its also very fun to play whit

Minix will run with less than 100MB I believe

Originally Posted by zmjjmz

Too little for this, but...
LaRoza, how well do you think that would run on 3MB RAM?

It will probably work.

**D-EJ915** · June 20th, 2008

Originally Posted by zmjjmz

Too little for this, but...
LaRoza, how well do you think that would run on 3MB RAM?

OS/2 2.1 crawls on my 16MHz 386sx with 4MB, so avoid that, plus it needs 19 floppies to install...that's the only reason I still have it on there, it took so long to get it on.

**Havoc** · June 18th, 2008

You could just take the HDD, install it on another machine with a bootable CD-ROM drive, install DamnSmallLinux on that HDD and then put it back to the original machine.

Linux *is* feasible on such a machine. I run Linux with IceWM everyday on an HP Jornada equipped with a 133MHz SH3 CPU (equivalent to a 75MHz Pentium CPU) and 16 or 32MB of RAM. It runs great.