I met a guy on IRC who wanted to install Xubuntu on his unusually obsolete system. In order to help him (keeping in tune with the Linux community's helpfulness), I began searching the net for an ultra-lightweight distribution. And I stumbled upon muLinux.
muLinux was created by Michele Andreoli, an Italian mathematics and physics professor, to run on old and obsolete computers. It can run from a floopy drive (Yups... a floopy drive). Based on Linux kernel version 2.0.36, the main drawback of the distribution is that it has very limited features and some of the codes and packages dates back to 1998. It can run with 8 MB RAM (4 MB, if installed on HDD), 20 MB HDD and an Intel 80386 (or later) processor. The last stable version was 14r0 and it was released on 2004-02-10.
I should warn you that it doesn't have a GUI (but you can install X11 in it). And you have to install packages like TCL, GCC, Perl, etc. in order to use them. Anyone who is new to Linux should stay away from it as it would be too complex and might give you a wrong impression about the user-friendliness and ease of using Linux.
Because of it being very small, I am thinking of downloading it's source code and modifying it to the extent that I can. I will keep updating about my progress of the project on this blog. Anyone interested in helping me should mail me.
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"Linux is only free if your time has no value" - Jamie Zawinski.
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Update: I downloaded the tgz files and browsed through the packages. I poked into the source code too, but didn't screw around too much.
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