[wellylug] Linux on Antique Boxen

Donald Gordon don at dis.org.nz
Mon Nov 25 08:17:22 NZDT 2002


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

FTP can occasionally be faster :-)

Debian has this wonderful thing called 'kernel-package' which lets you
build a .deb of a kernel on (e.g.) your big fast box, and then ftp it over
and install it.

What were the NICs plugged into?  I've had throughput problems with an old
cisco switch that doesn't seem to autonegotiate full-duplex mode :-(

> 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.

>From my experiences with Compaq [Contura] Aeros, there's usually some sort
of setup-floppy-maker downloadable from their site; if it's a P133,
however, the BIOS may not even support booting CDs.

> 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).

Console apps are probably a bit *too* minimalist; IIRC Netscape 4 is
usable on older machines (my mother runs it on a 32MB P200 :-).  Something
like icewm or fvwm95 with a nice big start button should be okay [I don't
know what fluxbox has].

What do they want to use the PC for, anyway?

> 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.

[debian-plug] pppon and pppoff are nice :-)

> 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.

Both my laptops (486sx25, P166) are usable (IMHO) and neither has more
than 32MB; however one doesn't run X and the other runs WindowMaker. 
Certainly, modern KDE/GNOME on a low-specced system is Not Much Fun.

> 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.

If they can survive with icewm/fvwm95 and NS4, I'd rather have them use
that then get stuck with win9x [which arguably isn't any more
user-friendly than the above, particularly if someone else is
administering the box].

don




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