Ruleng@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.