Douglas A. Tutty wrote:
Hello all,
I have a 486DX4-100 with 32 MB ram. I bought an 8 GB drive to put in my
P-II and it won't boot it so I've put in in the 486 along with a 1 GB
drive.
I'm on dialup and would like to avoid a bad partitioning decision
requring a whole new install/download cycle (I'm on slow dialup).
The purpose of the box is to try out the mechanics of using OpenBSD for
a desktop. Obviously, the 486 will be slow at running (or unable to run
some) desktop apps but I'll learn the mechanics of following patch
branch and get totally comfortable with the system. I'll also be able
to learn pf (I'm used to Shorewall on Debian).
The box has two drives, both Western Digital. One is 8.1 GB, the other
is 1.1. I'll be installing 4.1 release then installing the patches and
following their instructions re rebuilding.
Here's what I'm thinking:
wd0 (1.1 GB drive):
a 100 MB /
b 128 MB swap
c 1.1 GB
d 256 MB /tmp
e ~640 MB /var
wd1 (8.1 GB drive):
a 100 MB spare /
b 128 MB swap
c 8.1 GB
d 1.0 GB /home
e ~6.9 GB /usr
Do you think that this will give me all the room I need to install and
keep patched:
full install
icewm or Xfce
Konqueror
Firefox
a pdf reader or two (Evince, Kpdf, Xpdf)
mplayer
mc
mutt
vim
Yes, I know that compiles will take forever and a day, but hopefully I
won't be recompiling much; I need the space in case its required.
Slow does not even begin to describe how slow this 486 will be,
especially running your list of applications above, not to mention
system compilation. In less than one week of running that system,
waiting for it to load, run, and compile, you'll have wasted the amount
of time it would have taken you to just ask your friends, family,
neighbors, and co-workers for an old giveaway computer. You have to know
some one directly or indirectly that is upgrading to Vista and their old
P3 or P4 with 512MB RAM max just won't run Vista so they upgrade their
hardware.
I get all the spare computers I need, for free, just by asking. Just
last year I got a P4 1.6GHz with 512MB of RAM from the lady we bought
our house from. I just mentioned that I work with computers and she
said, "hey I'm buying a new Dell and I'm only going to send my old one
back to Dell for recycling, do you want it?" She only asked that I
remove the hard drive for her. Dell wasn't going to give her any credit
for it, only pay for the shipping costs.
The only thing I would use that 486 for would be an X client, with a
good graphics card, a router, or as a command line tinkering system.
BTW, your partitioning scheme looks ok. The only thing I would do is
increase the swap space. For me, just to get X and fvwm running takes
about 60MB to 70MB. I use Seamonkey for my browser and checking top
shows that it is currently using 144MB. With the list of apps you want
to run with only 32MB of RAM and 128MB of swap (256MB if you put swap on
both disks), you will definitely be starving the system of resources.
Can you say slooooooooooow?
Have fun!
Are these partitions a good size in the right order or are they any
suggestions for improvement?
Thanks,
Doug.
