Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt,uk.comp.homebuilt (
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Patrick wrote:
> David Maynard wrote:
>
>> Patrick wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>>
>>> My other 20 machines all run Debian, loaded upon the hard drive from
>>> Knoppix in 20-4- minutes, and run totally flawlessly on P90's to AMD
>>> XP3200's...
http://knopper.net/knoppix has ~90 versions, one is
>>> probably suited exactly to your likes and needs!
>>
>>
>>
>> I've been looking at those small linux distros too and am currently
>> playing with Feather, which is a remaster of Knoppix. Reason I tried
>> Feather was for the smaller, faster, XVesa server, and Fluxbox WM.
>> Feather isn't quite all worked out though.
>>
>> My question is, how much RAM do you use on the P90 class machines and
>> how is the response time? And what do you 'run' on them, as far as
>> apps I mean?
>>
>>
> Machines under 233Mhz take about a full minute +, to boot up...
> so, I really enjoy running any modern distro at 266Mhz or faster.
Yes, well, I'm not trying to be impractical and I realize the old pentium
classic machines aren't going to boot in 10 seconds. hehe
> But, to have some fun, I like to put linux on tiny resource machines.
That IS the point of what I'm trying to do. Might even make my own distro
if it could ever be made clean enough to actually work. So far, all the
ones I've looked at a rife with problems of one sort or the other.
> Smallest RAM I have got to work was 8 Mb on a 486, but, NOT with
> Knoppix, and any modern full blown office apps.! Usually at least 24Mb,
> because, I have a shoe box full of DRAM, both 32 pin, and 72 pin...
> The real pain is hitting one of the hard drive size restrictions in the
> BIOS, as many of the older boards haven't a new BIOS available.
I see. Yes, I know openoffice isn't going to run in 8Meg. Ain't going to
run with less than century measured load times in 32 either. And it's good
for a nice long coffee break with 64Meg on a P166MMX.
Abiword seems reasonable though. And ABS for a spreadsheet. Dillo, even
patched, isn't quite good enough but Opera seems pretty efficient for the
small machines.
Yeah, 24 sounds doable, from what I've seen, but I'd say 32 Meg minimum
with 64 Meg strongly recommended.
> Any machine that ran MS windows 3.0/3.1/3.11 can run a stripped down
> Linux, and I like to run XFCE as the small desktop GUI.
I haven't used XFCE yet but am downloading Luit Linux right now. That one
uses it but, from the forums, even dpkg isn't working yet on it. Fluxbox is
just too 'different' for the average home user.
Interesting that you complained about the hard drive size. My goal is to
get it under the original 512 Meg limit (which precludes openoffice almost
by definition). The 'reasonably useful' one I'm playing with now is using
350Meg plus a 64 Meg swap. (Abiword, Opera, xPDF, xmms, dpkg, apt-get,
firefox, plus what's on the feather distribution, although I'll probably
take firefox out because it's rather big and slow.)
IMO, the thing holding people back from using the older machines isn't just
the speed; it's that the newer versions of office apps, and such, won't
install on the older O.S.'s and the newer Windows won't install, or are
simply too bloated to run with any reasonable response times (not to
mention the cost of doing so for what would be a 'slow' computer). What I'm
trying to do is find a combination that has enough 'compatibility' to be
useful with the idea being that, for 'families', you don't necessarily need
the 'big' machine to do everything, with the resultant fight for the
keyboard, on 'the computer'.
Of course, I could be crazy
😉
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