On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 09:04:56PM +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> > A large ramdrive simplfies the installer: everything is run from a
> > standard location. But you can use the "textmode installer" which (I
> > believe) also has smaller memory requirements. Is it an issue of not
> > using a ramdrive?
> >
> > I figure that for Redhat the situation is the same.
>
> The text install will run in 32m of ram, but it requires a swap file before
> it will do anything.
Well, I figure that with enough tweaking you can install it (or maybe
install a base system using its packaes). But it seems you have better
things to do :-)
> > Do you really need a complete KDE/gnome desktop on such a computer? it
> > will crawl anyway.
>
> No, I what I really wanted, was:
>
> 1. Linux kernel
> 2. X
>
> With 32m of ram and a 486/66 to play with, I was just going to use it as
> an Xterminal.
>
It would be best to use a recent version of XFree. E.g.: RH6 comes with
XFree 3.x . No RENDER ("anti-aliasing") and probably other extentions
missing.
> > Anyway, RH3 uses anncient components. e.g.: ancinet libc and gcc. It
> > probably has XFree, but it may miss many of the current extentions XFree
> > now has. In other words: a complete waste of time.
>
> I don't think so. Escpecially since I really wanted an Xterminal. I'm running
> everything on a RH7.2 system soon to be replaced with a RH9 system.
Why not try a dedicated XTerminal distro?
http://old.lwn.net/Distributions/index.php3#diskless
http://www.ltsp.org/
OffTopic: Browsing at LWN's distro list, I noticed a newcomer to the
Historical distros section: SCO Linux .
Now it is no longer available, and moved to the historical section on
May 28, 2003
:-)
>
> > > So I settled for RedHat 6.2. It installed ok, but the smallest system I
> > > could make was around 500 meg. Using the boot from a 32m partition trick, I
> > > was able to get the entire disk work without extra software.
> >
> > How much time did you spend customizing the packages list?
>
> In the end none. I tried a few times and got down to almost 500m, which I got
> by not doing any customization at all. The first few attempts failed due to
> a defective hard drive, which much to my wife's delight, I trashed. :-)
>
>
> > Can you send me (privately) the output of:
> >
> > rpm -qa --qf '%{SIZE}\t%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}\n' |sort -nr
>
> I'll do that later. The machine is back on a shelf. I'm back to using my
> SPARCBook as an X terminal. :-)
>
> > Any idea where there is a recent ssh compiled for RH6?
>
> I used ssh 1.2.27 as I had it. BTW, that was only available as a source
> RPM, which took some work as I was orginaly installing in on an A/UX
> 3. system.
Aren't there servers out there that won't allow ssh1?
>
> > Behind a firewall? That's nice. What about buffer overflows in libpng
> > that allows your browser to execute arbitrary code?
>
> I don't use either of them. On small machines I prefer opera, for the
> stuff it won't handle, I run mozilla in a X window. Of course for me,
> Hebrew support is not an issue.
>
> > There have been enough holes in both netscape 4.7x and pine.
>
> Yes, that's why I use opera. and I use ELM not pine.
Whatever. My point was that the fact that you are behind a firewall does
not mean that buggy programs don't leave youy exposed to attacks.
>
> > Anyway, on my 32MB computer (debian woody) I have postfix working
> > happily in the background with (even with procmail and spamassasin). X
> > and the desktop I use (icewm) are not the major memory hogs: any attempt
> > to use two "serious" programs (mozilla, galeon, koffice-app, konqki)
> > together starts a horrible trash.
> Interesting, I dropped spamassain on my mail maichine cause it overladed it
> (PI 166, 64m ram).
Do you use spamd ?
> > What do you mean? If you have a reasonable network connection, then
> > installing a debain woody (the current stable version) workstation is
> > basically one-time download of ~200-500MB:
>
> I prefer to have the images downloaded first so that I don't have to
> leave everything hanging while it waits for Aruztzi Zhav to come back.
>
> I did a jigdo download of the m68k woody and it took almost 3 days from
> a fast mirror and six downloads running at once. Downloading a 3 cd
> distro takes about 6 hours if I download ISO's.
(I hope I did'nt get this wrong)
jigdo is simply a method for creating debian CD images from standard
debian mirrors.
But then, again, you could have just downloaded the iso images from
IGLU.
>
> >
> > So you can download the complete set of 7 CDs (or buy them) and install
> > from them. Sure. And if the computer allows booting from the CD then the
> > installer will boot from the CD.
>
>
> Not any 486. In fact I don't even have any PI's that will boot from a CD.
> The oldest x8 machine I have that will do so is a Pentium Pro 200.
In such a case you can use the boot floppies. Though you need at least
two of them, unlike RH where you need only one.
--
Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend|
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+
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