[dundee] Grub floppies

[Colin Brough]

> jamie cramb <jamie_cramb at hotmail.com> wrote: 
> > I once had redhat 6.0 running on a 486 with 4meg of ram.  X ran
> > but it took about 5-10 minutes to load and I was too much of a nub
> > at the time to know how to do anything else with it :D.
>
> Jamie, that's impressive. I think most linux install needs RAM rather than raw
> cpu power, if you could stick 1GB of ram in a 486, I think it would ?'run'?.

Older versions of Linux didn't need as much RAM. Mind, X on 4Mb is
pretty impressive - I needed 8Mb on my 386 to make it run, and that
was X11R4 I think on SLS 1.0.2 or so, with a tiny kernel (pre-1.0) and
only twm as the window manager. All I ever did was emacs, latex, xdvi
and ghostview!

One of the problems with older hardware is getting it to address all
the RAM you can buy so cheaply these days - as I said in a previous
post, my Dell Pentium I machine has a motherboard that can only
address 64Mb... so you can't stick more RAM in it than that. Redhat
5.0 and 5.2 ran pretty sweetly on it though! And Debian testing still
does... It boots and shuts down quicker than my main box (Mandrake
10.1, Athlon XP 2200+, 1Gb RAM)!

Cheers

Colin

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Colin Brough                             Colin.Brough at blueyonder.co.uk