[Bassetlug mailing] What you need to run Linux

[MJ.Wells]

You may be interested to know the spec for the web server used in the talk
tonight.

It was a Satellite 4010CDT that I had obtained by asking around for anything
that was surplus to requirements (StR) from all the people that I know who
are likely to have surplus computing equipment. So it was free, but needed
looking in the 'mouth' before use.

The PII 266Mhz machine had been upgraded from the 32Mb it was sold with by
the addition of 64MB extra making a whopping 96Mb of RAM. (It will take a
128Mb board instead when I can find one StR :) bringing it up to 160Mb)

It had in its past also reputedly been upgraded from a 4Gb hard disk to a
20Gb, but someone had downgraded it before I got it and after a happy hour
of trying to boot it I found that the problem was it had 0Gb of disk - the
slot was empty!

I only had to hand a 815Mb drive (yes - they made them that small once, I
have smaller on the shelf here) so I had to find a Linux distribution that
would fit in a 711Mb partition and allowing 64Mb for a swap partition. (No -
I am not sure where the other 30Mb has gone to either.)

I didn't have the courage to see if I could get Feisty, Hardy, Gutsy or
Intrepid to play at being one of the seven dwarves so I dug out my old
distributions to see what might work.

I found Slackware 3.5, RedHat 4.2 up to 7.1, Mandrake 6.1 and 8.2, and seven
issues of SuSe between 6.2 and 10.1.

Slackware I remember needed XFree86 to be hand crafted, which was something
I could do without. I really wanted something that would load X, apache,
mysql, PHP and gnome (its smaller than KDE which I prefer) without much
massaging.

I didn't want to use SuSe as I had run with that a lot in the past and some
of the configuration is a bit sticky.

RedHat has been very safe and the 7.1 disks looked clean and had French
words on them as I got them off a magazine cover when in France in
July/August 2001. That might be about the age of the Laptop so could handle
the hardware OK. I installed this, loading only those applications that I
really needed. It fitted, with a little room to spare. However, after
setting up LAMP I found that I had been too harsh in dismissing some apps.
When I loaded these they wanted to drag in more of X and that took it over
the drive capacity. I then got in  mess while trying to uninstall apps that
I felt I had been too kind to the first time. The result was that I had to
reload Linux from scratch. This time I just couldn't bring the distribution
down under 711Mb even though I went for twm as the window manager instead of
gnome.

I went back to those old distributions. I noticed that Mandrake 8.2 was a
year later than the RedHat 7.1, came off a Linux Format cover, is
essentially the from same stable (it also uses rpm packages) and I can't
remember ever loading Mandrake. So without much expectation of having more
than a frustrating, but different, experience I loaded it with the same hard
attitude to Application as before.

I was surprised to find that it reported that I would only use 380Mb-ish. I
didn't believe it, suspecting that it would drag some more in as it
installed, but allowing that it was unlikely that it would drag in over
300Mb more I stuck at that and let it install. It was the best installation
experience I can remember for any Linux distribution I have met. Clean,
informative and clear. And it worked. After the install I had lots of room
to go ahead and install phpmyadmin and other apps that were on my 'needed'
list, but not my 'REALLY needed' list. The final tally comes to about 530Mb
for a full LAMP server with gnome installed.

The downside? Mandrake is not updated with security patches, which, I
suppose, after 6+years is to be expected. And I only have two disks of a
three disk distribution, the third being all those third party extras.
However, phpmyadmin, for example, was installed from .tar so there is plenty
about to make up for the lack of the CD.

I also had to dig out a PCMCIA Ethernet card and both RedHat and Mandrake
found it and configured it OK.

And it worked - we didn't manage to find the HP Pavillion ze4800 (1.8Ghz
Athalon, 100Gb hard drive, but screen missing) running Ubuntu Intrepid.

Bear in mind that you would have to go back to Win98 to have any chance of
getting 'the other OS' on this machine. And when/if you managed (after
finding all the drivers) you would still have to load the rest of WAMP and
configure it.

The loss of laptop screen during the talk is another tale.

Perhaps you have some old hardware you can get up and running?

Martin