Simon Lemieux wrote:
> 
> What I was actually wondering is that I had the opportunity to get a few 386 and
> 486 for almost free...
> 
> What exactly are their speeds under linux compared to a Celeron 433?

Very much slower. They have clocks around 15 times slower than yours.
But they also may not have an fpu, which will divide the rendering speed
by something like 20 or more. And their cpu don't do the optimizations a
Pentium II-class computer can do. Divide the performance again. Besides,
they probably don't have a lot of memory (expect a mean 4 MB) which will
quickly be filled by a complex scene. And Linux barely works with 4 MB, and
can work with 8 MB, if set up carefully.

You can still do a lot of things with such machines, but I don't think
rendering is one of them, unless you get several dozens of such PCs and
have the space at home to set-up such a rendering farm (and watch for
the electricity bill!).

> And btw, can Linux (Redhat 6.1 for example) be installed on those slow PCs?

Yes, no problem. Err, I mean it works. You'll need RAM and disk space, though.
More than there used to be at that time by default. I have my old faithful
1993 computer. A 486 at 66 MHz, with 28 MB RAM (it had 4 when I bought it) and
a 2.5 GB HD (bought very recently -- it was a bargain -- used to be 163 MB).

But I don't think many recent Linux distros can be installed, mostly because
most of them use graphical installation and they won't start on such an old PC.
I use Slackware, and it works well (be warned, it's not the easiest distro to use).

Ccl: unless you're adventurous and willing to experiment, I think you'd best avoid
this, because you risk to spend a lot of time making all this work, for a rather
deceiptful result. But if you can get one, it can be funny. The above-mentionned
486 was my Internet station for six month (jan2000 to jun2000), and it worked well.

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