  freesco (stands for free cisco) is a free replacement for commercial routers supporting up to 10 ethernet/arcnet/token ring/arlan network cards and up to . == general description == freesco is a floppy disk based router, which means that the entire system will run from a 1.44 mb floppy disk. it is also possible to run it entirely from ram, in which case no disk activity occurs after startup. freesco works on any ibm compatible pc (i386 compatible spec or higher) and can be optionally installed to a hard disk. in practice this means intel 80486sx or better, with  preferably more than  to enable servers. the software is based on linux, using a 2.0.39 linux kernel (or 2.0.40). the first major version of freesco was v0.2.7, originally made by serguei storozhevykh and continuously improved by lewis 'lightning' baughman. since then, the software has improved substantially and comes with many server programs, but many more can be downloaded and installed. configuration is designed to be simple enough for those with minimal networking knowledge, but also very flexible. the current version is v0.4.5, released on march 30th, 2014. == features == at present freesco allows the following out of the box: * ethernet bridging * ethernet routing * internet connection sharing (through nat) of: ** dialup connections ** dsl connections (including pppoe and pptp) ** leased line connections * firewall * dial-in server * http and ftp servers * dns and dhcp servers * ssh server * time server * print server (lpd) the configuration system is designed to be very easy to understand and use, without being restrictive; freesco's setup utility uses a system of informative menus and prompts, with almost no need for the manual editing of configuration files. all the above listed features can be easily enabled, disabled, and configured through the setup utility, and are included on the floppy disk (with a small amount of room to spare). additionally, freesco comes with a package management 
Free_routing_software Gateway/routing/firewall_distribution Mini_Linux_distributions