Brian wrote:
> 
> I'm not looking to start a war here but I'm looking for comments /
> suggestions on a good distro. I've got a 386 laptop with 4 MB RAM and a 60
> MB hard drive.  The real solution here would be "upgrade your laptop",
> but this is what I have.  My primary use for this machine is Cisco work. I
> basically need a laptop that has VT100 terminal emulation (minicom is
> nice), dialup, and ethernet capability.  I need something light, fast, and
> stable as my laptop is none of these.  I've been born and raised on Redhat
> but dabbled with Debian.  Slack is beyond my understanding.  FreeBSD is
> just plain obscure.  Any suggestions on a tight, fast OS to accomodate my
> needs?

There are a number of small distributions listed on this page:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/

Not all of them are small, obviously, but there are a few.

Also, you might want to try modifying ZipSlack (variant of Slackware
that takes up less than 100 MB) for your needs:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/slackware/zipslack/

Or, if you're bored, have some shell programming skills, and know how to
use `which', `ldd', and `strip', you can roll your own (`man init' would
be the place to start).  Of course, considering that you only have 4MB
of RAM, you might want to ditch bash as a shell and go with something a
little smaller.

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   Eat drink and be merry, 
/ \/ \(_)| ' // ._\  / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__   for tomorrow they may  
\_||_/|_||_|_\\___/  \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __)  make it illegal. 
[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ]