It may look like Linux 2.4.18, but it’s actually a tarpit.
At work, we've spent at least a month trying to beat what R*dh*t laughingly calls 2.4.18 into a shape where it will actually work on a large machine (4x Xeon 3.0ghz, 12[was 8]gb) without doing impolite things like running out of memory and causing a large collection of software (that was written during one of the times when people did think that computers have infinite memory and thus would never run out of memory) to fail.
Hahaha!
We thought we'd manage to club the stupid OS into submission, so we rolled the patch onto a client machine, made the changes, and let it fly while I was whisked away to the unrelenting tedium of jury duty.
I returned to work today to find that, yes, our spiffy client machine was doing the usual stunt of looking at 15gb of empty swapspace, then rejecting it as an inferior product. Fork() was happy, but the system was down to some tiny number of buffers, so a simple fuser command was enough to bring the whole machine down in flames three times on Thursday.
Aiieeee! Aiiieeee! The pain! The pain!