Hi, Don:
I tried to put linux on similar equipment and could not get it going.
LOWMEM.TXT indicates that it can be done, but I was not sucessful.
You'll need more RAM and a HD floppy drive for recent distributions.
Some current linux distributions are CDROM only. The distribution sets are
not broken down into 1.44 Megabyte sub-sets.
Get at least 4 Megabytes. My brother compiled a kernel on a (386dx33) 4 M machine
and it completed < 16 hours. I've done it with 8 M and it took about 30 minutes.
16 M took about 15 minutes. 32 M takes about 5 minutes and my swap partition
was barely touched (about 150k used).
The above times are with real-memory + linux-swap => 32 Megabytes.
YMMV
My current linux fs occupies ~ 77 megabytes of disk space. I am using an
old 80 Megabyte HD. I am assuming that with the 64 Megabytes of RAM on board,
the HD will rarely get used. My filesystems are
/ 81 M maxtor 7080 ; 77 Megabytes used, 4 Megabytes unused
/dosd 240 M conner cp30251 ;XCOPYed CDROM:\SLAKWARE\*.* D:\/S
/home 40 M st157a ; 0 bytes, so far
/? 40 M conner cp3044 ; unmounted
You could try 80 M linux-native and 9 M linux-swap. If you can compile a kernel
on another linux system or an already compiled kernel is suitable,
you can save ~ 28 M of disk space (and much time :-)
I copy the distribution set (+RAWRITE.EXE+BARE.I+COLOR.GZ) to an extra hard drive
(>120Megabytes) build the linux OS, then the extra HD can be removed.
OR get the distribution diskettes over the modem from the 'net'. It'll
take lotsa floppies. :-|
Regards, Chuck
Don Harrison wrote:
>
> I am currently using an old PC for ALL my computing [as it is all I have].
> I was wondering if I may be able to convert it to a linux box. It is old
> and VERY bare. It consists of the folllowing:
>
> 386SX 16MHz
> 2 Megs of RAM
> 512k on the video card
> 89 Meg HD
> NO CD-ROM :(
> 5.25" & 3.5" Floppies
>
> Right now I'm running Micro$loth 6.22 and Waffle/UUCP for my net connects.
> It is straight text [obviously], but fits my needs well for reading email
> and newsgroups. I wanted to know if the conversion from DOS to Linux could
> be possible with such an antiquated system.
>
> Thanx,
> Don
--
Researching GELM
