Re: compact distributions for old equipment

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

I did a quick test, using Slackware 3.9 on a 200 meg hard disk. A quick,
lean install took up about 70 megs, and it included a lot of stuff I could
clean out for a system that was intended to serve the limited purposes that
Rob described. I ran no networking on the system, and I tried both the VGA16
and the SVGA X servers.

On a 32 meg system, running VGA16 X and fvwm2, with only one xterm open,
free reports 25 megs free. I could increase this, but only by a little bit,
by compiling a custom kernel and not running the standard set of virtual
terminals. Moving to SVGA costs only about another 100K of RAM.

Based on this quick test, a good estimate for available RAM on a 16 meg
system is between 9 and 10 megs. With 150 megs of hard disk, 32 megs of it
used as swap, I figure the system files would take up around 40 megs (that's
not cutting them too lean, since I want to be sure to provide the libraries
the actual apps might need).

With this information as a guide, what can someone suggest in the way of a
sample set of apps to try to include in the sort of dedicated grade-level
setup that Rob was originally asking about? I'll be happy to pursue this
further, but additional tests, to be realistic, require some input as to
desired apps.

>At 01:52 AM 7/6/99 +0200, Malonowa wrote [in part]:
>
>>Maybe one way forward is to setup possible configurations for these
machines and
>>see how much spare ram is left. That'd give us programmers something to work
>>from/bear in mind when developing.

------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA  94303-3603    	 	        ray@comarre.com        
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