[Cumbria] re the RH SuSe "discussion"

[Michael Saunders]

On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Ken Hough wrote:

> Yes, you can run X on a 486. In the past I've done it, but it's not
> really workable, certainly not at 33MHz and 8 MB RAM. With this the hard
> disk will be working very hard.

Yeah, it's unusable for any modern apps but the tiny Xlib ones like
XPaint, XCalc etc. work adequately -- plus it's a nice way to have large
xterms rather than the 80x25 standard text terminals.

It's the implementation that matters -- X on some old 68k boxes with 4M 
sped along nicely, but XFree86 is a bit slow and has so much hardware (and 
a crufty architecture) to deal with.

> Recent Distos (all as far as I know)  REQUIRE a Pentium or better and
> usually 64 MB of RAM.

Red Hat compile for 386 but with 686 intruction ordering, to achieve
maximum compatibility yet not destroy performance too much. Slackware is
still 386, as is Debian -- but most do recommend 64 megs for a graphical
install. (Debian will install in 12M, and possibly 8 if swap is enabled
early on in the installation process).

> If you wish to run on an older processor, the easiest solution will be
> to dig out one of the older distros. My 486 box is running SUSE v6.4. I
> also have v7.2. If anyone would like a copy of either of these, let me
> know.

Think I've got both somewhere, along with loads of Red Hats, Mandrakes,
Debians, Slacks, AlphaNet, TurboLinux, Phat Linux, Corel, Definite and
zillions more. Someone should set up a distro museum so they can have a
good home :)

> Even with my Pentium 266 / 64MB RAM, the likes of KDE3 is not workable.  
> It will run -- if you have helf a day to wait. It's workable with icewm
> though. Haven't got around to trying to run applications via X over my
> network yet as everything I need is on the Athlon, so no driving need.

You could run KDE 3 over the network and display on that P266 box, turning
it into a useful little terminal. Long as it has a decent video card and
properly tuned X, it should feel like you're sitting at the Athlon.

> The SuSE manuals are, IMHO, useful intros to setting up Linux, but then
> I would say that. BTW there aren't many German words in latest manuals
> -- and it's ENGLISH English, not American!

Huzzah! SuSE (wisely) aren't trying to be too competitive in America so we
don't have to tolerate "color", "flavor" and "ahm gonna put a cap in yo
ass". I think I worked out "Ziffer" to mean "key" (as on the keyboard)  
eventually, but the German words were cute to see in a Japlish kinda way!

> After the simplicity (?) of say MS Windows, the Linux file system can be
> daunting. Who would guess that there is such a wealth of useful
> documents under /usr/share/doc/howto/en/html ?

Yeah, the filesystem layout can be strange at first glance but it makes
infinitely more sense than the Win32 style -- is the config file in
Program Files\App, or in C:\Windows, or just in C:, or the registry? Most
HOWTOs are fantastic, and more keep appearing to cover just about any task
under the sun.

> I can even burn CDs while doing other jobs -- something I wouldn't risk
> doing under MS WIndows 98. I've never had a duff CD under Linux, unless
> it was due to me getting it wrong.

I'm always scared that the big weekly cron job (automated script to update
search databases etc.) will kick in when I'm writing a CD -- I keep
another xterm open to renice it if that happens :)

Mike

-- 
Michael Saunders
www.aster.fsnet.co.uk