Hi all,
Andrew Savory wrote:
On Wed, 5 Apr 2000, Aquarius wrote:
I'd like to build a Linux install on a machine I have, an old IBM PS/2-70, which has 8MB of memory, 160MB of HD space, and is a 386.
I had linux running on a 16mb 386 with a 400mb disk - slow and painful, yes, but it worked. I didn't bother with X though.
Am I vastly over-reaching the capabilities of the machine?
Probably ;-)
o X in 8MB, ouch. Is this vastly unlikely?
Swap city, I suspect. On a slow machine with a slow disk, there will be much pain.
I had an old 486-25 SX with 20Mb running X and everything else that you usually find in a Linux box. There were other issues with the hardware but it managed - slowly. I even had it all running (with X) in 4Mb but the swapping was too bad there although it was fine with up to 10 text terminals.
I reckon that you will have more trouble shoehorning the disk files into 160 Mb. I soon upgraded to a big IDE disk and this made a big improvement although I never tried running any large apps (although Netscape 3 was OK).
I guess that the real challenge will be to pare down the daemons and services that you start so that you don't hit the buffers.
Have you looked at the minimal distributions that are available? AFAICR there are several that will run from a floppy (no X) and two were called mu-Linux (greek letter) and Linux-lite and there was a small version of X at http://sunsite.anu.edu.au/archives/linux/distributions/tinyX (ages ago).
Good luck, keep us posted.
Regards, Dermot
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