Ruleng(a)aol.com writes:
> Hello Steve and others, First I must say that there appears to have
> developed some peripheral discussion, under the heading of my
> original request for help, that I do not understand, and so I cannot
> respond to.
Yeah, that often happens. Tangents are the order of the day here
sometimes.
> > I forgot to mention in my original note that I have 16Mb RAM.
Right. There's probably nothing to stop you installing a minimal
debian or slackware setup on that machine, as long as you can allocate
some hard disk for it. If you're happy to play with mulinux, that's
fine too, but be aware that a fuller set-up is possible. You can
probably even get X up with a bit of tweaking and optimising, but
don't expect Mozilla to run without lots of swapping.
"Small distributions" are normally small in the loading setup really.
The thing that will cause the most problems is the lack of CD-ROM, but
you can net install Debian (I'm sure we'll have a debian mirror on the
LAN at a future meet) or Slackware still supports putting the base
system on from floppies, I believe. Really, those two are about as
alike as chalk and cheese, but either would be an easier system to
play with instead of trying to shoe-horn things onto floppies.
Perhaps Peanut Linux or something that can live in a UMSDOS partition
would be good, instead. I'll let others with more recent experience
comment on that.
> It worked well on relatively small files, but when I tried to apply
> it to the KIng James Bible I ran out of memory. I wondered if an OS
> that provided multi-threading would solve the problem. Does it? And
> so I began to look at Unix/Linux.
Aha... it's more likely to be that the version of the scripting
language it was using wasn't compiled to use extended memory on DOS.
I often (well, last time I was working on a project where others used
*that* OS) sent out perl scripts with a perl4 interpreter, as it all
fits on a floppy and is fine for doing certain tasks. You have to
make sure that you watch the memory usage, though. Good programming
required.
--
MJR