Recommended distro for 48696MB *no GUI

the Black Sun and said:

I didn't know 486s came in 200MHz varieties, but this should definitely be possible with most distros. You said "the monitor does not handle graphics". Is this monitor VGA-compatible, and is the graphics card VGA-compatible? Support for the really, really old video adapters like CGA-Hercules has sort of atrophied now, so you might have a hard time if the card-monitor aren't VGA.

When you boot from an install CD, you usually have a choice about whether to use a GUI or not. I know the Gentoo install CD can use the framebuffer to start a GUI or not; boot parameter is something like "linux nofb". When ISOLINUX starts, it usually displays a message like "press Return to boot, F2 to see boot options". Pressing F2 will usually get you a long list of things you can type in to start a GUI or not, search for SCSI peripherals or not, activate ACPI or not, etcetera.

Good that the CD-ROM's bootable. Too many older machines didn't have bootable CD-ROMs. You should be able to use any distro as long as you deactivate the GUI. Procedure varies with distro, so see what the boot menu says about the options you can feed to the kernel. HTH,

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL