Linux Newbie help

[aiex]

Ok, i have a 486 sitting here with 8mb of ram in it and want to make it into a netserver for me and use it in order to dial up my internet account when it is required. I am a total newbie to linux and would have no idea how to start so some help would be greatly appreciated 🙂

My current plan is to run a proxy program on it when i get it up so any sugestions? I can find a harddrive if required for it and it has a CD-Rom drive, so sugestions please!


Thanks in advance


Alex 😀

 

[Armitage]

Take a look at FREESCO.
It's very easy to set up. It runs off a floppy, so you won't have to find that hard-drive. All you need is a modem and a network card (10baseT is fine).

 

[Nothinman]

With only 8M of memory I would skip the proxy, since you have no hard drive your whole system will be in memory leaving only a few Megs of memory for the proxy cache which won't help at all and may even hurt performance.

Just auto-dial and IP masq would be fine on the 486 though.

FreeSCO or Coyote Linux are probably your best bet since they're made just for that, if you ever want to really learn Linux stop by Linuxdoc.org and Linuxnewbie.org and thumb through the documentation there.

 

[aiex]

I tried freesco, but it refused to work, it kept comming up with an error when loading the ramdisk, i tried running the sugested program to fix this but no joy 🙁

As for a hard drive i can easily get them so i should be able to install a proxy i would think?


ALex 😀

 

[n0cmonkey]

With only 8MB of ram you wont be able to run much of anything. Just let it dial in and be a router type of machine (especially if you cant get more ram). squid or another proxy like it would be too much, especially if you cant to do caching (which is one of the biggest benefits of proxies) because of small disks.