[wellylug] Linux on Antique Boxen

[Ilia Pavlenko]

> 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.

You don't necessarily need 2.4 kernel. 2.2 will do just fine of
workstation. Compile on big box, copy kernel and modules to small box
using floppies (come on - vmlinuz only about 600k, and /lib/modules/...
could be bzip2'ed and transported using several floppies.)




>
> 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.


yes, Compaqs are  booby trapped :) you should've  kept that "compaq
maintenance" partition of 20Mb, which has the "Bios"


>
> 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).

did you kill the junk that starts up automatically ? all these daemons
that noone needs on w/station ?


>
> 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.

did you measure bootup time of win98 in networked enviroment with
everyone's favourite McAfee antivirus and micros~1 office toolbar/findfast
?

>
> 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.

dial-on-demand mode ON ?



Have a lot of fun :)

Ilia


>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>   .-.   Wellington
>   /V\   Linux
>  // \\  Users
> /(   )\ Group
>  ^^-^^
>         http://wlug.paradise.net.nz/
>
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>
>


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