I meant to send this message to the softcon list a couple of days ago, but mistakenly sent it to the tmonroe list. Apologies to those of you who may be receiving it twice.
I just want to report to the list some preliminary success with installing a distro I found some time ago that billed itself as survpc-friendly. Only now have I gotten around to trying it, when all else failed. And it seems to have resolved the problems I was having. Let me give a brief report. I have an old P75 I use at my office for light browsing, email and chat. I initially installed an old Red Hat version on it - 6.2. It ran ok using that, but try as I might during the install, I could only trim down the installation to about 400-500 MB. So, right after installation the HD was already about 90% full! Then, I needed an instant messaging (IM) client, so I loaded AOL's IM client for Linux. To make a long story short, that piece of software is crap, and it kept screwing up my system. I decided to try out GAIM, an opensource IM client written for Linux. I had an outdated RPM on that RH machine, so between upgrade hassles and paucity of disk space, I decided I should just go for an updated, trimmed down install of something else. I tried installing the latest Slackware, but even with substantial trimming it was more bloated than the old RH I was using. Tried a recent Debian with similar results. Neither of those, for whatever unfathomable reason, would giving me a wor! king X install, nor would Libranet - a user-friendly Debian adaptation. I was getting to my wits' end with this. Then, Steven Darnold's latest efforts on Slack 8.1 seemed to offer some hope. But, once again, I was stumped by X and getting a working install. Finally, I remembered Vectorlinux. I downloaded and burned a couple of CD's (they have differing install options), and had at my old P75 with them. I had to do considerable fiddling with refresh rates for this old monochrome monitor, but I finally got a working install of X. And the distro seems to run quite well on this old machine. It is only a 350 MB install and could doubtless be trimmed down alot more (it's basically a preconfigured system, so unused progs could be eliminated). It uses a recent version of Slackware, though I'm not sure which one. The newer apps like GAIM and Dillo will install fine on it. It has the very latest Linux kernel - 2.4.19, from which I'm considering "downgrading" since I don't need things like USB support on this machine. All-in-all, I think this distro is a good choice for lower-end hardware. Newbies might have a tough time of installing it, since the documentation is not especially well written, though. But this near-newbie did manage to get ! it going with just a few hitches.. I would say that Vectorlinux occupies a middle ground between the full-blown distros and BasicLinux: it offers smaller size and survpc tweaks (like allowing to use older versions of X), but still gives alot of the amenities of the major distros. It's way behind Steven in terms of system trimming, but takes a bit less savvy to get it up and running. I guess its edge over BL and the full-blown major distros with regard to survpc's is that it takes less geek-factor to get it to install and run. I'm not saying that BL is hard to install, but in terms of getting a working system (having things that I really need like an IM client) BL proved an insurmountable challenge. Trimming the major, full-blown distros down to a size amenable to this machine proved an equally insurmountable challenge for me. For those in my situation (i.e., having a deficiency of geek-factor but wanting to run Linux on older hardware), Vectorlinux may well be the way to go. James PS My guess is that Vectorlinux could work ok on anything down to a 486 with 16MB RAM, but probably not on anything less powerful (unless one didn't want X). 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
