> > It seems that a good place to start for this project is defining what the > > minimum system requirements for running the Debian-Win32 should be. Here > > is what I propose: > > > > CPU: Pentium. Setting this as high as is reasonable makes for better > > optimization of the generated code. While I think Pentium-II > > would be an even better choice, I assume it includes instructions > > not available on other high-end CPUs of today, such as the AMD > > Athalon. > > Maybe require the MMX instruction set? MMX helps most for multimedia > stuff, but also for big memory copies. SSE (aka KNI (on PIII and > P4), aka 3dNow professional (on AMD K7 Palomino and later, and K8, see > http://www.sandpile.org/impl/k7.htm)) is too high a requirement. It is > great for FP math, esp. on P4 (with SSE2). Requiring 3dNow doesn't make > sense, because that's AMD-only.
Yeah, I agree that requiring a P-III is a bit much. We could probably move to this requirement at some point in the future. Since this system will be an add-on on top of another OS, it's likely to need less legacy support. So, "Pentium with MMX" instruction set? Is there anything in the P-II instruction set also common with competetive AMD chips? (I'm afraid I'm a bit out of touch on all this -- most of my work lately is on an 8051.) > > OS: Windows 2000 or XP. Since 95/98/ME/NT are obsolete by MS standards, > > I don't think we need to support it. Let's make use of the abilities > > of the newer operating system versions rather than try to be > > compatible across all of them. > > Unix on Win32 is hard enough as it is, so yeah, good idea. People with > older systems can use ordinary cygwin, or if they really want GNU/Linux, > install it natively :) Which is one of the reasons why I think we'll have fewer problems with having to support legacy systems. A combined system is only likely to be used on workstations where people do development and those get replaced every few years. There won't be many back-room servers running a set-up like this. > > RAM: 128MB. This is already a requirement of Windoze. > > > > DISK: 1GB. This is also a requirement of Windoze. Perhaps it should > > be 2GB to be able to hold both systems? > > Disk requirements are best specified in terms of free space > remaining/needed, not total size of disk. (RAM and CPU use are scheduled, > so one process can use all of either while running, but disk space is not > like that.) 1GB of free space sounds sensible, if maybe a bit high for a > minimal setup. Okay. I guess we'll get more info on that as we get some packages together. It gives us a target to stay within, though. Brian ( [EMAIL PROTECTED] ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy!"... until you can find a rock.