I am doing this just for fun, I have several more powerful machines at hand but thought it would be cool to resurrect an approximately 14 year old machine with a Pentium II processor. I will have to reinstall the RAM so I am not sure how much I will manage to put in there.
So should I use FreeBSD or Damn Small Linux as the distro for this project? I anticipate that I will use it mainly from the command line, though a very basic X-Windows manager would also be welcome.
I am actually leaning towards FreeBSD, since all my prior experience has been with Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora mainly) and this would be an opportunity to explore FreeBSD.
Any suggestions as to distribution, advice or suggestions?
Best Answer
Since you're doing this just for fun and would like to have an opportunity to toy around with a different OS, you might as well try out OpenBSD.
From my experience, I had no problems installing and running a fairly recent OpenBSD version on a system with Pentium I CPU at 166MHz and 24 Megabytes of RAM.
Usually resurrecting and toying around with old boxes is fun, but you're probably won't use them for long -they're noisy, take up space and the energy they consume is not worth it.