Re: [SLUG] breathing new life into old hardware

From: Eben King (eben1@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 22:20:18 EST


On Mon, 10 Nov 2003, Ian Blenke wrote:

> ethan zimmerman wrote:
>
> > 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
> >
> > I know linux will work just fine but what about X? Will X even run?

Slowly, and with limited colors (depending on your video card).

> > (seeing as how gnome probably won't)

Gnome might depend on more-than-256 colors, but I wouldn't run it or KDE,
because (a) it'll run like cold molasses; and (b) it'll use lots of RAM.

> can't remember many PCI 486es,

Nor can I.

> If you can get X up, XFCE should run (and relatively lightly at that).

Or FVWM2, which is also light weight.

> > 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?
> > You only need your /boot partition below that 512M mark (for your
> lilo/grub bootstrap). Beyond that, you should be fine once the kernel
> boots and probes the chipsets/drive.

It doesn't matter if the BIOS can recognize other than the /boot
partition, as Linux doesn't use the BIOS.

> Installing to a system with 7 500M partitions is also very doable, if
> that's the approach you want to take.

It would be a pain once you got the OS up to have that many partitions.
But really, if you chop 400M (or less) from the 1G drive and make that /,
the rest /home, then make the 3G /usr, that's good for a start. I had an
entire setup (no X) in ~350M on a 486. That's not remarkable; I'm sure
many people have had smaller systems.

> Depending on your distribution, you may have an issue getting a newer
> pentium+ compiled kernel running on your mobo (depending). Most distros
> have a 486 friendly boot floppy though, just in case.

Custom compile the kernel from stock source. Would take a day or so.

-- 
-eben    ebQenW1@EtaRmpTabYayU.rIr.OcoPm    home.tampabay.rr.com/hactar

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Ben Franklin

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