hello!i have a 8 year old computer.it's 386dx, 40mhz,4mb edo ram,and it has 400mb hd.i'm looking for unix or linux which can work on my computer.if you know where can i find it please help me.if you have one please send it to ilovebasic@yahoo.com.
You won't be able to use a windowing environment (unless you're very patient), but you can use any of the big BSD's (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD...), many Linux variants will install just fine as long as you do not install and run stuff you don't need (X, servers, etc...). Also, there is Minix, which will run on almost anything Intel (8086 up 'till current - not sure about 64 bit processors, though).
Try name-of-unix.org, example:
freebsd.org
linux.org,
so on...
I'm not sure if anyone sells anything commercially that will still run on 386, but all of the above are free to download.
Also, please learn to use the search function on this site before posting. I'm sure this question has been posted before..
i do think all linux can run on your machine but should be in the command line interface mode, how many space u will need for install the linux, just 1.44M...
A good idea might be to temporarily remove the hard disk and do the installation on another (=with more memory) computer. I believe later linux distributions requires a little more than 4 MB RAM 
Official homepages of Red Hat and Slackware says 64 MB and 16 MB for their systems. Maybe a little too much, I got a slackware 8 installation on a 486 with 8 MB RAM.
Good luck !
I had RedHat 4.0 on 386 with 12mb RAM running just fine, without X ofcourse.
Umm... I actually have kernel 0.98 somewhere on my hdd too, but it is rather hard for me to make it work 