On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 08:41:05PM -0500, ethan zimmerman wrote:
> Okay I wish to breathe new life into old hardware by turning an old pc
> into an email-checking-web-browsing-solitaire-playing machine.
>
> First the bad news (the hardware)...
> - 486DX 50Mhz
> - the bios can't see partitions bigger than 512MB
> - and it's running windows 95 (hehe)
>
You forgot memory; that's important.
> What I want...
> - a GUI with Mozilla (hopefully epiphany), Games, Gaim and XMMS
> - I would like to use GNOME, but then again I would also like to be
> relaxing on a beach with a drink in one hand a small team of experts
> nearby working out ways they can be nice to me
>
Hey, when those guys are through with you, send them my way! And save me
a spot on the beach!
> I know linux will work just fine but what about X? Will X even run? If
> so will XFCE run? (seeing as how gnome probably won't)
>
Depends on memory, but no matter what, this machine will run like a dog
under X. I'd guess (and this is just a guess) that you'd need somewhere
between 32M and 64M to make X work and have your X applications run. X
itself can probably live on a 16M machine, I'm guessing. Xfce is pretty
slim, so I don't think you'll have a problem there. Gnome and its apps
are another story, though. Mozilla's an absolute pig. I'd suggest Galeon
instead, as it's slimmer and has similar capabilities. I run it as my
primary browser, and it does anything the others do (including SSL,
javascript, etc.) but does so in a less bloated executable. Worst case,
I guess, would be that everything slows to a crawl when you launch an
app. I'd suggest plenty of swap space if you're using a newer kernel.
Older kernels had a de facto limitation of 2x memory for your swap
space.
> Oh and if that's not hard enough the bios can't see partitions bigger
> than 512 MB. I've got a 3 gig and a 1 gig hard drive that I'm going to
> cut into 500 MB pieces and install. So how do I install linux on a
> system with 7 500MB partitions?
>
I don't believe the BIOS even matters, though someone may want to
correct me. I've had machines like this, and as long as they'll boot,
Linux will bypass the BIOS and figure out for itself how much space
there is. But if you insist on having < 500M partitions, then you'll
just have to mount them correctly. That is, in installation, you'll want
to tell the installer about all those partitions, and it should ask you
the mount points for each one (Debian does this). Then you only want to
make sure that you set your mount points in such a way that you're not
likely to overfill a partition (like /tmp). You can check a currently
running system for the space different major directory trees take up.
> Also I'm thinking of using debian because it seems to be a pretty
> minimal distro (I haven't played with it much except with knoppix
> remastering)
>
Debian is anything but minimal. It's huge. When I say that, I mean that
it's got several CDs worth of almost any kind of program you can
imagine. Now of course you can choose not to install most of it. I
believe you can get a Debian install down to maybe 250M or less.
HTH,
Paul
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