[wellylug] Linux on Antique Boxen

[David McNab]

Hi all,

I've just spent a painful weekend installing GNU/Linux onto a friend's
P133 PC with 32MB RAM and 1GB HDD.

A big part of the 'fun and games' was building a 2.4.19 kernel, and
installing a driver for the WinModem, as well as experimenting with
various combinations of desktop software.

It took longer for make to build the kernel deps than my 1.5GB box takes
to build the whole thing. Tried building on big box and NFS'ing over,
but for some reason the small box kept choking the link to about 12kb/s.

Wasn't nice either that the box is a Compaq Deskpro, with no onboard
BIOS and no BIOS floppy - had to boot off Debian rescue and root
floppies before I could hit the CD drive.

Luckily the box had an onboard NIC well-supported by Linux (what NIC
isn't! :)) Otherwise it would have been dial-up hell.

Mozilla takes over a minute to load, and Dillo is too dumb, so I've gone
for most of KDE, with Konqueror and the office apps, with Sylpheed for
the email. OO totally out of the question.

I tried the minimalist approach - fluxbox, links/dillo, pine etc, but
what was gained in speed was way lost in user-friendliness (my friend is
a PC newbie).

As for partitions - 16MB boot, 80MB swap, the rest root, with swapd
standing by to carve off 16MB chunks in case of emergency.

Still not brilliant - 2 mins to boot, 40 secs for Konqueror etc, but at
least it's a newbie-friendly desktop now, albeit a complete
swap-thrasher.

KPPP totally loses the plot - keeps terminating the dialup connection
and starting again - so I wrote a couple of suid progs which launch and
terminate pppd directly.

Bottom line of all this?

64MB is a bare minimum for a usable system.
Anything less feels like root canal therapy during a hangover with no
anaesthetic.

This is something people might like to keep in mind when volunteering
for the SeniorNet Linux install program.

If anybody asks me again to build a user-friendly Linux desktop on such
a tiny box, I think I'll be telling them to either upgrade RAM, or go to
Cash Converters and score a cheap CD from that notorious northeast USA
company and fend for themself.

Cheers
David




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