From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Mar 20 21:56:58 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mailout5.nyroc.rr.com (mailout5-0.nyroc.rr.com [24.92.226.122]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 54B8637B400 for ; Wed, 20 Mar 2002 21:56:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from myrealbox.com (syr-24-161-96-98.twcny.rr.com [24.161.96.98]) by mailout5.nyroc.rr.com (8.11.6/Road Runner 1.12) with ESMTP id g2L5uiM16945; Thu, 21 Mar 2002 00:56:44 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <3C99761C.3050201@myrealbox.com> Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 00:56:44 -0500 From: Tom Parquette User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i386; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011126 Netscape6/6.2.1 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Roger534@aol.com Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Will this work? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG My first FreeBSD machine was a Dell 486/66 with 16mb of RAM. It would usually take me 36-48 hours to build the world but I was in no rush. This machine is still alive and kicking. I use it as a sandbox while I figure out how to make something new (to me) work. If you run XFree86 the machine will grind to a halt because of RAM usage. If you're going to run X, you should think about at least 128mb of RAM. I love rescuing old machines from the dumpster but at some point getting IDE disks to work will become the major problem. e.g. getting ISA controller cards is becoming a problem. Go for it. It's a good starting point. Cheers... Roger534@aol.com wrote: > I recently came across a boxed copy of FreeBSD 4.2 on the "clearance > table" at a local office supply store. My old PC is a 90MHz Pentium with > 24 MB RAM and a 503 MB hard drive. I bought the box (it was only $17) - > would converting my old PC to a UNIX-only machine as a hobby be a > practical idea? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message