[rescue] OS for low memory machine

[Joshua D. Boyd]

I have an SS2, which I trying to get going (I need either a CD-ROM or boot
server, both of which are being troublesome).  It has some hard drive
space (it can easily be expanded if need be), and 40megs of ram.  Well I
originally was thinking SunOS for historical reasons, but things changed
and I don't want SunOS on this machine for the same reason anymore.  So,
then I was thinking NetBSD because it is fast and powerful, and happy with
not much memory.  However, things change again, and now I want an FDDI
card in this machine, which seems to mean going back to an official Sun
operating system, but I also want to do real work on the machine
(specifically, run one or more web servers and postgres database for
developmental work).  So, should I go with SunOS (the machine won't be
directly exposed to the internet, but rather certain ports for SSH, and
and web servers will be portmapped), or a Solaris?  I'm pretty sure that
Solaris 7 and 8 would be unacceptable on only 40megs, but what about 2.51
or 2.6?

Or maybe, I should just find an IPC type machine to take the FDDI card (I
need a machine to bridge from the FDDI network to the ethernet) and go
back to putting NetBSD on the SS2. 

While I'm mainly a graphics guy, where I currently live, money is more
easily made doing web stuff.  Plus, there are certain web services that I
need for myself.  Specifically, my bookmarks (currently managed with a
perl CGI script and a tab delimited file on a school machine) are getting
to be to numerous.  I want to go with something that allows me to enter my
own keywords and comments, plus keep track of when added, and keeping a
full text copy of all bookmarked pages for easier searching.

Plus, I want keywoard based categorization, and user management, since
some people have been bugging me to make this a public service.

--
Joshua Boyd