Steven Said, > with only 4meg RAM you'd be crazy to run X. Yes! The voice of experience....it is WAY slow and thrashes your hard drive like you wouldn't believe...I'm not crazy - just not too smart! Although there are "proper" ways to get around the 8MB RAM install requirement, I find that if you can either borrow some RAM just for the install or mount your harddisk in another machine it is VERY easy. The small chassis and short cables in this Compaq 386 made the prospect of even temporarily connecting a CD daunting. So I just pulled the HD data and power cables, snugged the now open Compaq up to my old Pentium and stole power and data cable from it's H/D - voila, a Pentium with an 80MB hard drive, 32 MB RAM, CD, etc....installed both Slackware and Debian this way (at different times, mind you). You don't want to run the ethernet and mouse configuration (yes, even without X a mouse can be very nice in Linux for cut and paste) until you're back on the machine with the actual hardware - but that's about it.... Slackware 3.6 runs well with 4 MB of RAM and the default 386 kernel. The default Debian 2.1 kernel is bigger and thrashes more than I like. If you are serious about using smaller memory, definitely consider learning how to make your own kernel with just the things you need in it. This takes some reading and thought to choose the right things - but the process itself is VERY easy. The Kernel HOWTO is pretty helpful and I remember a HOTO or mini-HOWTO on making a small distribution but can't remember the name. If you have a choice, "make menuconfig" is easier than "make config" - I don't know if Slackware has the former...(Steven?). Bob To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
