FAQ

Why not just use [your favorite lightweight distro]?

Well, does it run on a 386 with 4MB of RAM? I mean, that's really the issue here. If there really is an existing LiveCD that runs on such a system, send it my way, maybe I'll stop developing BL-LCARS.

Why use such an old kernel?

Linux dropped 386 support in 3.18, so we have to use something older than that. BL3 and Slackware 4 shipped with the 2.2 series, and the 2.4 series is very compatible with 2.2. I haven't done any testing trying to build 2.6 as small as possible - it's hard to imagine it will be smaller and faster than 2.4, though.

2.4 is a good kernel - it's got SATA and USB support for XP-era systems, it supports every retro sound card, it supports tmpfs and devfs and other vaguely "modern" niceties, it even supports GPT partitions tables. I'm finding little reason to use anything newer.

Why not build from scratch?

Slackware 4 has quite a bit of useful software already built for it, and most all of it will run happily on ancient systems with minimal RAM. It would take me years to build everything included with Slack 4. Most of it is still very useful

But what about SSH+SSL

This is a huge problem.