[seul-edu] Re: Best wm for tiny slow computers?

[Michael Shigorin <mike@lic145.kiev.ua>]

On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 08:26:28PM -0500, Ralph M. Deal wrote:
> I just started distributing a 6.2 configuration that takes
> about 360M but without the abiword editor I had hoped for.
Look in /usr/share/{locale,timezone} -- some extra 20+ Mb could
be reclaimed by deleting extra data.

> tasks such as shutdown.  Any suggestions for an editor with
> table and list capability smaller than abiword?  
If .doc compatibility isn't an issue, I'd recommend LyX.  It's
more on the right way, as a side effect.  If you have network,
you can typeset them on nearby teTeX; if you don't, then this is
not the way probably.  And more on typesetting -- consider lout
package if you'll get into it -- it's compact and should do the
job (of typesetting).

> I've had to copy disk images with dd by starting up and
> shutting down LINUX between transfers since I must have cold
what do you mean by "cold"?  Perfect copies are made with three
disks in a system -- one to boot, one as fully-umounted original,
and one more as a target.  Of course, there are variations as on
booting from tomsrtbt, network, second root on original,
temporary root on target...

...but if hassle is unbearable, "init 1; umount -a; sync; sync; dd"
should do the job (although you get root partition copy
non-clean in terms of fsck).

> hard disk transfers.  Any better way (other than getting an
> extended ribbon cable to serve several hd's at the same time -
> how many are possible bythe way?)?  Would more RAM make that
Depends on your layout -- doubt it has sense to use more than one
active HD per IDE channel (so you end up with say booting from
hda and then dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hdc bs=1M), and that 75MHz
PCs usually don't have more than two PCI IDE channels anyway.

> transfer faster?  It takes about 16 minutes for the actual
> image copying on the 16M, 75MHz machine.
hdparm -d1c1u1m16a16 /dev/hdX (do read the manpage and experiment
with one target drive first!) should set DMA on disks; you may be
able to estimate transfer rates by running hdparm -t /dev/hdX
(and compare them afterwards).  Check -a/-m parameters, as say WD
drives are known for being broken in many places.

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@altlinux.ru>
  ------ http://visa.chem.univ.kiev.ua/~mike/