Uh, 386 support got dropped with linux ~3.8 IIRC. Besides, you don't really want to try and run a modern kernel on anything less than say a pentium3 due to RAM

Uh, 386 support got dropped with linux ~3.8 IIRC. Besides, you don't really want to try and run a modern kernel on anything less than say a pentium3 due to RAM constraints. As someone who tries this kind of stuff in an effort to keep some older hardware running, even when you do get it up, the experience can make it basically unusable. Waiting 30 seconds for a login prompt/whatever isn't "usable". Sure, you can disable 95% of the kernel, but all kinds of stuff actually have hard-coded dependencies on things you normally never use, simply getting the kernel up isn't the same functionality that was achieved (full X/WM/browser/etc) on the same hardware a decade or two ago.