Dale Mentzer wrote:
>
> What would be wrong with 2 different releases, one
> for < 16 megs and another for > 16 megs, other than
> the obvious time involved in supporting 2 releases?
If it were just a matter of giving people a larger
ramdisk to play with, there would be no problem.
But my motivation in going to an 8meg ramdisk
would be to increase functionality. In particular,
I'd be heading toward some sort of GUI option. A
very slim one, naturally. It's inevitable that I
would concentrate solely on this project and that
computers with less than 16meg RAM would be out in
the cold. As a keen supporter of survivor PCs,
I'm not ready to slam the door on all those 486s
with eight 30-pin SIMM slots.
Also, it seems to me that there is a fundamental
flaw in using more and more RAM just to hold the
filesystem. Sure, if you've got 256meg RAM, you
can affort to tie up 8meg or 16meg for a ramdisk;
but (again) those survivor PCs don't have that
luxury. I'm desperately trying to avoid getting
into the position where I end up saying: "Sorry,
your computer is not powerful enough. Go out and
buy a better one (you luser)."
So, since a survivor PC is short of memory anyway,
I should be looking for a way to free up the 4meg
currently lost to the ramdisk (instead of trying
to steal even more). This leads me to the HD
version of BasicLinux (which is just about ready
for release) and a loop version (which I have
only just begun to think about).
> BTW, BASLINUX works pretty good on this Compaq
> Contura 4/25CX w/ 8 megs RAM
Imagine how much better it would perform if we
gave it back 4meg RAM.
Cheers,
Steven
