>Are there any free pre-compiled distribs for the 386? I have an old store-bought copy, but would rather install the latest and greatest.
>
>TIA
hmmmm... where do I start? ;-) Distros are not 'pre-compiled' in the sense I am taking you to mean. They are not one giant monolithic program.

Here is a free Linux distro
http://www.ibiblio.org/peanut/
It is only a 150MB download. I don't know if it will run on a 386 but for a precompiled distro of only 15)MB is size that is also free what do you have to lose?

Most distros, even the very latest, have an 600MB or so ISO that you can download for free and burn onto a CD. If you go out to Cheapbytes you can get a CD of any distro you want for under $5.
http://www.cheapbytes.com

Running a distro like SuSE 7.x on something as slow as a P166 with 64MB is doable (I did it for almost a year) but it is as only about 10% faster than an NT4 or Win2000 would be on the same box if you were running the KDE desktop. If you used fwm95 or Enlightenment it would be about 10 times faster, but then you wouldn't have that neat KDE GUI with the cut&past, drag and drop, etc., features that make the GUI so useful and easy to use. It would be impossible to get any where near useful performance out of SuSE 7.3 running on a 386 and I doubt if YaST2 would let you load KDE on that box.