Eliran Gonen wrote:
>
> Alexander Maryanovsky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > A friend of mine had her windows (98) die a horrible death and she asked me
> > to reinstall it. I told her that I could install a better operating system
> > called Linux instead. Now, this would be fine and dandy, as she doesn't
.....
> Perhaps RedHat 6.0/6.2 with Gnome 1.4 or Kde 2 ?
I was recently given a 486/66 that I had nursed along for years as a windows
computer for a neighbor. They finaly bought a used PII and instead of trashing
the 486, gave it to me. I found that this particular machine had bad ram and
a hard drive, but I had both in my junk bin.
I installed 32m RAM and and a 1.6 gig hard drive. I looked around for linux
distros to install on it. I tried RH9, but it took too long to install and
used to much space. What ever happened to a "minimal" install?
I've installed RH9 on Pentium I machines 133mHz/32m RAM, but they needed a lot
more disk space.
So looking around, I tried to install Redhat 3.0.3, which seemed to be about
the size I could fit on the hard drive without any extra Disk Manager
type software. The 486 BIOS was limited to 520meg hard drives.
I found that 3.0.3 has completly disappeared from all archives. Even a Google
search found directories, but they were empty.
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.
I then found the following problems:
1. There was no C compiler, The last RedHat packaged C compiler for it was
EGCS. Adding EGCS and make and some other tools brought it over 600meg.
2. There was no SSH. I had to compile SSH, which required GCC, so number 1
became relevant.
3. There was no SUDO. I had to comiple it from source.
4. Every known security hole in Linux from about two years ago was present
and NOT fixed. Not a big problem to me, as the machine would always live
behind a firewall, but one in the real world required a lot of updates.
5. X windows works, but slow. If you remove things like sendmail, and things
that might be usefull in the real world, you can get it to run without
swapping.
This does not count as a RedHat limitation, but the machine had a Tseng Labs
ET4000 VLB display card with the gigantic (at the time) 1meg of video ram.
The best I could get out of it was 800x600x8.
BTW, I decided to not use Debian as I prefer to download complete ISO
images instead of using jigdo.
Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson [EMAIL PROTECTED] 972-54-608-069
Do sysadmins count networked sheep?
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