Hello Everyone. My name is Norman Rule as you see. I am 70 years old, and use a Dan computer which had an i486 DX-33, since enhanced to 133Mh with an Evergreen upgrade. I have two hard disks with a total of about 650 Mb, but as yet no functional CDROM drive. I use MSDOS 6.2, enhanced with 4DOS, and I have Windows for Workgroups, which I only use for programs that demand it. I would like to try Linux as an alternative to examine its possibilities, and from reading believe my system will suffice. However, I decided to start off by trying the Italian small offering called Mulinux. I have been able to start this system either from my hard drive, or from a Boot+Root+Usr 1.772 Mb floppy. My problem is that there are several add-ons that one should be able to introduce with such titles as X11, GCC, VNC, TEX, etc. I have had continuous failure to add these, and since I only have 3 hours a month on the Net from AOL I feel that I cannot spend too much time trying to download different material in a blind attempt to solve my problems. There seem to be no useful documents to help ones first efforts. If anyone has the experience of Mulinux and the time to help me I would be very grateful. By the way, I dabble in Assembly Language and have one or two questions on that if there is anyone out there who would have time to help me. I do have a 40X CDROM drive but so far have not been able to get that to function either. I get the message that an appropriate driver cannot be found. I realise that this group is primarily interested in Linux, so I would ask for any help with that first, please. Sincere regards, Norman G. Rule
On 04-Jul-01 Ruleng@aol.com wrote:
Hello Everyone. My name is Norman Rule as you see. I am 70 years old, and use a Dan computer which had an i486 DX-33, since enhanced to 133Mh with an Evergreen upgrade. I have two hard disks with a total of about 650 Mb, but as yet no functional CDROM drive. I use MSDOS 6.2, enhanced with 4DOS, and I have Windows for Workgroups, which I only use for programs that demand it. I would like to try Linux as an alternative to examine its possibilities, and from reading believe my system will suffice. However, I decided to start off by trying the Italian small offering called Mulinux. I have been able to start this system either from my hard drive, or from a Boot+Root+Usr 1.772 Mb floppy. My problem is that there are several add-ons that one should be able to introduce with such titles as X11, GCC, VNC, TEX, etc. I have had continuous failure to add these, and since I only have 3 hours a month on the Net from AOL I feel that I cannot spend too much time trying to download different material in a blind attempt to solve my problems. There seem to be no useful documents to help ones first efforts. If anyone has the experience of Mulinux and the time to help me I would be very grateful. By the way, I dabble in Assembly Language and have one or two questions on that if there is anyone out there who would have time to help me. I do have a 40X CDROM drive but so far have not been able to get that to function either. I get the message that an appropriate driver cannot be found. I realise that this group is primarily interested in Linux, so I would ask for any help with that first, please. Sincere regards, Norman G. Rule
I have never heard of Mu Linux I currently use SUSE 7.0 but have heard SUSE 7.2 is very good, Most of the major distributions all include X11 gcc tex and the like (I dont know what vnc is! (is it virtual network computer?)) I should get either a standardish distribution py perchesing it or come to a linux meet and we have some new Mandrake demo distributions we could give you.
I feel you will have a hard job running the most graphics intensive desktops under linux but my main maschine is a pentium 200 MMX with 64 MB of memory and it serves as a development maschine. Although I am thinking of upgrading as I want to run some stuff thats just to slow atm.
I should start with a distribution we have all heard off and then go on from thier.
I also suggest you contact NTL to both reduce your phone costs and connect to the internet for free 24hrs a day.
Owen
Hi Norman,
Linux does have a reputation for being able to work on more modest hardware than a windows based system of similar power and certainly the system you describe should run Linux OK. The one thing you don't mention is how much memory (RAM) you have in this machine. X11 needs much more than command line Linux and I would think that 16Mb should be considered a minium to run X11. For command line only access 4M is more than enough. Depending on how much memory you have you may also want to choose a small window manager (like fvwm) rather than a big one (like englightenment) or a big desktop environment like GNOME or KDE.
Some packages for Linux can be quite big and as you say 3 hours a month isn't very much on-line time.
One option would be to look for an ISP who provide more bundled time with their internet package. As I work for BT though I will leave it to independant Alug collegues to give you suggestions on this front.
The other option is to get the CD-ROM driver working. The first question has to be "does it work in DOS/Windows?" If it does then we know the hardware is OK and we just need to sort out a driver for Linux. If it doesn't work in DOS/Windows we may still be able to get it to work in Linux, but it isn't so certain.
As for problems specific to MuLinux I can't offer general help in response to a general description of the problem because I don't know that distribution. That said, there is often a lot of common ground between distributions and if the problem is that you try something and get an error message instead of the expected result then if you tell us what you were trying to do and the exact text of the error message then someone may be able to help.
For documentation, good resources are the Linux Documentation Project (www.linuxdoc.org) and your distribution's web site (I tried www.mulinux.com but it seems to have been parked).
If other things fail then another option open to you is to bring the machine along to one of our meets and see if we can solve your problem there. Others have done this and it has been very successful.
I hope this helps. Steve Fosdick.
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Steve Fosdick