[jcurbo]

"But can it run Linux?"

Of course it can, 486s were common in Linux's early heyday. During my senior year of high school and freshman year of college ('97-'99) I ran Debian Slink on an IBM 486SX. X ran a little slow on it so I used it in console only mode. I mostly used it to do compsci homework. Before I settled on Debian full-time (still using it to this day) I used Red Hat, I think v5 (the original numbering, before RHEL). And before that probably Slackware on floppies. I eventually got an AMD K6-2 which ran a lot faster...

Of course, this article is about running modern Linux, but Debian Slink is still there to download and install and I'm sure it works just peachy.

The section on configuring the kernel really gives me nostalgia as I used to build my own kernels back then, something I haven't done in years.

[themadturk]

I ran a 486 as an internal web server in the law office I worked at in the early 2000s. Don't remember any of the system details, but it ran very nicely until at least 2006.

[imoverclocked]

Ah, the good ol’ ping of death days.