[Cialug] what distros were out in 1996?

[Kevin C. Smith]

> -----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
> 

Try Debian http://www.debian.org.
Install the minimum. 
If it runs fine, start adding software: apt-get install <package name>.

Debian has worked for me on older systems in the past. That's how I was
originally introduced to the distro.

-- 
Kevin C. Smith