>>>>> On Fri 29/12/00, "asb" = Andrew Steven Ball wrote:

  asb> Comments, suggestions and hysterical laughter are all quite
  asb> welcome.

I've recently got NetBSD running (well, shuffling) on an
even more tired old system than Andy's machine.  :-)

It's a 386SX-25, with 120Mb hard disk, 4Mb RAM (yep, four),
a floppy drive and an NE2000 clone NIC.  Installation was
accomplished (eventually [*]) using an old boot-tiny to
create a 20Mb swap partition, then interrupting the 1.5
boot-tiny sysinst to activate it before continuing.  I built
an 1100kb kernel for it on my main machine, and got pretty
much all the stuff needed into about 60Mb of disk space.

The memory limitation makes it move rather slowly, but it
can just about cope with running dhclient, telnetd, bash and
pine for one user.  Just about.  Suggestions for reducing
system memory overhead would be very much appreciated.

Mark <><

[*] My original thought was to put Caldera DOS on it, but I
don't have a clue how to make TCP/IP (and DHCP) work there.