>I want to set up a dial-up mail server/internet gateway for a home network. I have an offer of a 486 with 12MB RAM, 233MB HD. Would this be up to the task if I install just the bare minimum?

Yeah, that should work. You won't be installing X (which is the biggie). You may run into a little bit of a space crunch if you try to install the dev packages so that you can compile your kernel, but I'm pretty sure that you can get around that if you stip the machine down everywhere else.

j