[Wolves] Small Linuxes

[sparkes]

On Sat, 2004-01-17 at 21:27, Steve Ruffles wrote:
> Would this do as a smoothwall box - I've heard folks use these to protect
> networks. Would it manage Knoppix run from cdrom (if machine has optical
> drive?).
Knoppix is the last thing I would recommend for low end hardware.  

Let's take a cool distro and make it boot and run from a live cd.  All
fine so far.  Then let's take loads of helpful features like
autodetection of hardware so it boots so much easier on the majority of
machines (of course this is bloat but it is a cool feature our users
will love it).  All fine so far.  Then lets pile in as much crap as we
can and compress it until it runs like a dog on older hardware.  Let's
not look for best program for the filesize and memory it uses all our
users have kick ass hardware and don't mind waited a couple of mins for
an application to decompress, load and get to a usable point.  Hell our
users have the latest hardware like us don't they?

It's another example of a good idea gone bad when feature hungry
programmers start adding bloat for no other reason than it might get
them laid.

The firewall suggestion is much better I used my 400 PII laptop with a
broken screen and it loved smoothwall and even mandrake multiuser
network.  But that said before that it ran openoffice on a full debian
install with kde and gnome 2 so it made an excellent desktop replacement
before it's accident.

I still believe the coolest use for it is kismet.  Adam (it was Ad that
started this thread wasn't it? memory fading, need more caffine) has a
wireless card, he has a machine that will run debian (but might need to
mess around with the install initrd and kernel or find one a debian
developer has knocked up), has a pcmcia slot and will run console apps
like a dream.  With the addition of a few extra packages it also becomes
an X terminal for when he is at home and needs to hack on the bog ;-)


> Steve 
t'other steve ;-)