On Sun, 9 May 1999, George Bonser wrote: > > Well I got the old 386 put back together, figured I would use it for a > firewall. 386SX33 with 10MB of RAM. Man, what an example to show what OS > bloat has done! I used to install Win31 on it, even installed OS/2 Warp > on it. Now it is running Debian and MAN is it S-L-O-W.
Well, technically it's *installing* Debian... > In dselect the Scanning available packages .......... part puts out about > one dot every three seconds. I'd agree, even on a 486-100 w/64MB of RAM, installing Debian is not fast. I usually start it up, go away, and then come back and answer questions every once in a while. It took *quite* a while on my 386SX-16 w/6Mb of RAM. About a weekend, I think. Long enough that I dread ever having to do it again. A good chunk of that was due to simple swapping, though - there's no good substitute for enough RAM. Once installed, though, things are zippy emough. Irving (my 386) is not a speed demon, but I actually ran X on it once, just to see if I could, and it worked reasonably well. > Running modconf ... where it looks to see which modules are available > (like, almost any time you hit a key) ... go get a cup of coffee. Why > can't it remember which modules it saw the last time it looked? > Man, I think maybe the maintainers should be forced to install their stuff > on a 386 just to get some perspective. CPU horsepower sure can cover up > inefficient code. Or to put it another way, an system without any CPU > horsepower sure exposes the inefficiencies. There does seem to be some less-than-optimal coding in some parts of the install. Part of it's due to large chunks of it being written in Perl. Well-written C will always be faster than well-written Perl. But even so, a I think some better algorithms could be chosen. > I guess I won't be compiling any kernels on that box ... well, maybe ONE > just to see how long it takes. Okay, now *that's* going to take quite a while on a modern kernel. Hope you've got a week or two to spare. :-> A 386 is a nice machine in some ways, but it's never been the fastest compiler in the world. On the other hand, let me tell you about coding under Minix on an 8088 w/512K of RAM... :-> Sincerely, Ray Ingles (248) 377-7735 [EMAIL PROTECTED] "[B]eing able to break security doesn't make you a hacker any more than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer." - Eric Scott Raymond