[H-GEN] HEADS UP: Debian for Kids

[Frank Brand]

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>G'day Frank,
>I just got this from Dino at
>justletmelogon at yahoo.com
>
>snip....
>I have got Slackware and X running on a P133 with 8Mb
>of ram and 2 200Mb HDD's, so a 486, 16Mb, 300Mb HDD
>should be doable
>...snip
>You want me to find out more?


No not necessary. The point is not so much that it is do-able. I suspect
that it would be technically possible although a minimum installation of
core packages and X might be 150 + mb but then there are the application
programmes to run and the swap partition ( I would have thought running X
with 8 Mb RAM that the swap partition is going to be pretty critical). So
300 Mb is going to be pretty tight.

I think the real problem might be that, it may run so slowly that, in
comparison to Win 3.1 especially on a 486, to not be used. I am just
guessing here as I have not tried to do this on a 486 SX with 8 Mb RAM. Even
on earlier machines (and a P100 is about the slowest machine I have used X
with) I always used at least 32 Mb RAM.

My recollection of Sparc 2's with 8 Mb RAM (around 486SX speed) was that
they were pretty pedestrian using X. Usually people running X on these
immediately sought 48 Mb RAM.

No need to check...you guys will find out how it is on Saturday if you
proceed and you can do all the benchmarking and checking you want but what
is most important is how it feels to the user.

I would have thought tho that they might easily be able to get a few extra 4
Mb RAM chips to up each machine at least to 16 Mb...most people I know throw
these away now.

If necessary I would investigate GEOS...I think it was a HP product and from
what I saw it looked quite reasonable...it was a windowing system that sat
on top of DOS and ran quite nicely on 486 with 8 mb....should not be too
hard to find legal copies of DOS 6 in the bottom of most corporate drawers.


Frank Brand





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