[Cialug] what distros were out in 1996?

[Nathan C. Smith]

There are several distros that will run on an older pentium or 486.  The
biggest issue is getting the installation started.  You may need to check
the BIOS to make sure the machine can boot from CD-ROM.  Some older machines
couldn't boot from CD-ROM.

Distributions such as Redhat, Fedora, Debian and others can be started from
a floppy drive to be installed over the network or from CD.


-----Original Message-----
From: Darcy Baston [mailto:darcybaston@mac.com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2005 10:19 PM
To: cialug@cialug.org
Subject: [Cialug] what distros were out in 1996?



I just got an old Pentium 200MHz machine, with a 1996 Phoenix BIOS.  
It's got 32 megs ram and an 8 gig hard drive.

Tried to boot off Mandrake 9.2 (works on wife's laptop) : "no  
operating system found" -> BIOS message

Tried to boot off SuSE 9 live CD (works on wife's laptop) : "upgrade  
your bios" -> SuSE message

Managed to boot and install OpenBSD 3.4 (works fine on year 2000+  
computers I've tried it on), but it can't find /usr/bin/sh when it  
boots, so I have to manually make it load csh instead (at a #  
prompt). I can see it in /usr/bin when I'm ls'ing around, but the  
file system gets mounted read only anyway so I can't even create a  
user account, get a login prompt or anything.

So now I'm open to see what else I can try and what's easier on me.  
I'm too much of an amateur to get going on OpenBSD. Was Redhat the  
way to go in 1996? Where can I get 10 year old distros to try? What  
do you think is wrong with the BIOS that SuSE and Mandrake won't  
boot? Thanks!

warm wishes,
Darcy


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