I have a 486/33 that I got out of the trash, and it's working perfectly fine. I had a second machine I also got the same way, but it had dual 486's. When it installed Red hat 5.2 from FTP, it went great! bravo! But when the much slower 33mhz machine did it, it gets the hdlist, then takes WAY too long to analyze it before going after the next file, and in the meantime, the FTP service has closed. May I suggest closing the FTP connection while it analyzes and then restarting the connection when it's ready to start grabbing packages? Thanks.
How much memory is in the slower 486 that you are having problems?
We have observed this to be a bug in the installer when it comes to ftp connections timing out. We are working on fixing this for the next release.
FTP has been overhauled for the next release.