I'm so @£¤%£$# angry

[mikeymike]

A BSD might suit your purposes better.  A friend of mine is running a P233MMX/128MB RAM, running all you've said and more without any problems.

If he's ok with it, and you would like a bit of help with it, he might be able to help you out.

Btw, there is openssh for NT4.  Can't remember if I ever got it working, or whether it's any use at all, but anyway :-)

Btw [2] I'm not a BSD advocate :-)  I've used it for longer than any Linux distro I've tried, and certain things are much easier to accomplish on it, but other things, like my failed attempt to get the nvidia FreeBSD driver working on it turned me off it :-)

[mikeymike]

re: FreeBSD

I can give you a few basic pointers here and there, how to install stuff, how to recompile kernels, disable basic stuff, email me if you run into any problems and would like some help.

[mikeymike]

In general RedHat is pain in the ass to upgrade. Basically you'll end up reinstalling the whole OS with newer RedHat version.

Sounds like the RedHat developers have been reading the Windows songsheet again :-)

[mikeymike]

@ carls

Would the FBSD4.8 mini-ISO cover my needs?

That'll give you a wide range of hardware support, basic unix tools and ssh/d.  You can get it to install from FTP easily too.

The /usr/ports collection for installing stuff [easily], basically you find what you need in the dir structure, do a make install clean and off it goes, downloading what it needs.  I don't know how secure/up-to-date FreeBSD 4.8 is now, I don't keep up with FreeBSD anymore.  Another way for installing stuff is through /stand/sysinstall (an app) pre-compiled packages, basic configuration options and ports collection options are also available there.

The FreeBSD official documentation on the website is quite readable by UNIX documentation standards (aka. unusually good).

Easily = I can do it and I don't know much about UNIX :-)