James & Tatiana Miller wrote: > > Did you read the link supplied recently by John Oram > about someone who had installed a very recent version of > Mandrake (maybe 8.2?)
Yeah, I read it. IMHO Slackware is a much better starting point, although if you really try (and you know what you are doing) you can cut down any distro. > It sounded like, even with a 486, such a late kernel works > fine, with the right amount of tweaking (e.g., rebuilding > the kernel without certain, unnecessary options). The problem is compiling the damn kernel. The post 2.0 kernel source has become so bloated that it nearly overflows the free space on my HD and takes forever to compile (on my 486). I work by trial-and-error. Compile, test, recompile, retest, etc. It's not unusual for me to recompile something 7-8 times to get it just right. But this process becomes absolute tortue when the compilation you begin at breakfast is not finished until lunch. Nevertheless, the Linux world has turned its back on libc5 and the 2.0 kernel, so it's time for me to move forward (kicking and screaming). If any of you have been reading the headers of my emails, you may have noticed that the i486 has now been replaced by i586. A couple of weeks ago, I bought a secondhand Dell P166 with 64mb RAM. Hopefully, it will have enough oomph to compile a 2.4 kernel in less than an hour. > when you speak of "obsoleting" some older PC's by building > BL 2.x on Slackware 8.1, do you mean primarily 386's? The CPU is not the issue. With a slow CPU, you just have to wait longer. The real issue is RAM. 386s and low-end 486s usually have eight 30-pin-slots for SIMMs. In most cases the best you can hope for on these machines is 8mb RAM. Yes, I know there are 4mb SIMMs (I have ten of these myself but it wasn't easy getting them). Yes, I know there are 386s with twelve SIMM slots (but they are very rare). The standard version of BasicLinux does run OK on systems with 8mb RAM, but it's a very tight fit. If you run too many processes at the same time, it runs out of RAM and crashes (I've done this myself in testing). BL2 will enevitably have a much larger kernel and much larger libraries. 8mb RAM is definitely not enough for the ramdisk version (although I will probably try to make a HD install available for 8mb RAM, like the current HD install for 4mb RAM). > And with those "larger libraries", what sorts of hard > drive sizes would be ruled out? Less than 500MB, for example? I don't expect HD size to be an issue. You should still be able to put a useful installation on a 40mb HD. And with a 170mb HD, you should have room for something pretty fancy. It just depends on how big the packages have become in Slackware 8.1. BasicLinux will still use Slackware packages for X, GCC, etc. I'm hoping they haven't become too bloated. As for the the base HD installation (which is currently just 5mb), I expect it to be around 10mb. Beyond that, you pick whichever packages you want from Slackware 8.1. Once again, do not expect anything tangible before Christmas. Cheers, Steven 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
