On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 11:15:38AM +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
> 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?
The default installer of Mandrake requires 64MB . This is mainly due to
the fact that the installer runs with a ramdrive of 32MB (IIRC).
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.
>
> I've installed RH9 on Pentium I machines 133mHz/32m RAM, but they needed a lot
> more disk space.
Use custom installtion. Ditch stuff you don't need.
Do you really need a complete KDE/gnome desktop on such a computer? it
will crawl anyway.
Ditto for all the documentation in any language that is not English (I
assume there is no Hebrew documentation there).
>
> 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.
What about ftp.redhat.com ?
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.
Nothing you can't get from, e.g. RH9.0 + fvwm/icewm/fluxbox
>
> 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?
Can you send me (privately) the output of:
rpm -qa --qf '%{SIZE}\t%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}\n' |sort -nr
I'm sure that there much to slash from
>
> 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.
Any idea where there is a recent ssh compiled for RH6?
>
> 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.
Behind a firewall? That's nice. What about buffer overflows in libpng
that allows your browser to execute arbitrary code?
There have been enough holes in both netscape 4.7x and pine.
>
> 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.
Hey, people used X and sendmail even before there were 32MB computers!
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.
>
> 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.
800x600 is indeed a problem. Many programs are not desinged well and
have dialogs that won't work well in this resolution.
>
> BTW, I decided to not use Debian as I prefer to download complete ISO
> images instead of using jigdo.
[ I don't want to start a flame war , or even claim this is incorrect. I
just don't understand what you mean here ]
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:
1. The basic installer installs a very minimal system
2. The installer then configures sources for the rest of the packges
- those may be from CDs
- or from the internet
- or from a local location
- or any other mix
3. Then you complete thee installation by choosing the packages you want
to install.
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.
--
Tzafrir Cohen +---------------------------+
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir/ |vim is a mutt's best friend|
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] +---------------------------+
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