Hi Nick, Yes I understand your thinking but there are good reasons behind all this. Whilst it's true that I don't have lots of cash around at present I did have a 486, a bit of spare time and a desire to get to grips with Linux. The distro was carefully selected as one which would run on the hardware and did not have an automatically configured window manager and GUI. Therefore I have had to configure it from scratch and hopefully get on to a useful learning curve, which has certainly been achieved.
When I have this box up and running, connected to my home LAN and I can e-mail the group and print off the replies, then its purpose will have been served and I will certainly feel a sense of achievement. I do have Ubuntu dual booting on my laptop. It installed smoothly, found my router, got on the Internet effortlessly, found my printer and automatically mounts a USB floppy and flash drive. I must say that I am impressed but haven't learned much from it. I hope this helps to explain my strange choices. Cheers - Woodsey On Wed, 2004-12-29 at 18:38 +1300, Nick Rout wrote: > Woodsey, I have been watching your posts with some interest. You are > persistent and obviously not silly, you have been able to follow > instructions and learn from your experiences. You are a pleasure to have > on the list. However I think this futzing around with a minor outdated > and tiny distro on outdated hardware is wasting a lot of your time. > > my recommendations: > > go buy a decent pc, by which I mean something cheap and second hand like > a p 3 800 MHz with 256 M Ram ( I say that because I am picking that the > fact you are playing with a 486 means you aren't flush with > discretionary cash). Then get a real distro, i recommend suse or ubuntu. > > > then use the 486 for something it will do with ease - running an ipcop > gateway/router for your home lan :-) > > Not that I disapprove of setting up linuix on old hardware, I do it > myself from time to time, but I gave up on 486's some time ago (I did > get small linux going on a 386sx25 laptop once).
