On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> I remember there was a tiny Linux that had a tiny sendmail, don't remember the
> name of that distribution.
Monkey?
http://www.spsselib.hiedu.cz/monkey/docs/english.htm
He says it's not a toy, and it isn't, however it
does run on the UMSDOS filesystem, which has some
drawbacks. It's a good learning tool, but I don't
think it's ready for prime time. IOW, I wouldn't
use it as my primary OS/distribution.
> I looked through the README80.TXT for Slackware 8.0, and it looks like I'd need
> 946 MB for a tight fit, not including GIMP and GNOME (350 MB), KDE (390 MB),
> teTeX (135 MB) and xview (15 MB). Compilers total 280 MB. I can only
> accommodate about 780 MB now. Maybe Red Hat and Mandrake are fatter?
Mandrake is definitely fattest. When I tried to
install it (7.1) onto a system with ~1.6GB free (on two
partitions), it told me I didn't have enough room.
Also, the Mandrake you're likely to get on CD will have
a kernel for compiled for 586's. Mandrake is definintely
optimized for newer and bigger machines.
Last time I tried a minimal RedHat (6.x) install, it
came in around 125MB. You could manually trim that
some more, that's about as lean as the install program
will go.
Desktop Environments are mostly just eye-candy.
If you want your machine to DO stuff rather than LOOK
fancy, skip Gnome and KDE. They both use LOTS of drive
space, and lots of memory, and would slow a 20MB
machine to a crawl (for either DE, plan on a minimum
of 64MB RAM).
Use a lean window manager instead. For absolute
tiniest window manager, I think tvm wins the prize,
but then it's not extremely functional either.
I think OLWM/OLVWM is probably next on the lean
list, and then probably comes Blackbox and fvwm/fvwm2.
IMO, fvwm2 gives the best bang for the buck, but
YMMV.
For maximum configurability, some swear by
Window Maker.
Check out some of the various window managers at
http://www.PLiG.org/xwinman/
- Steve
