>> Has anyone tried or know of anyone
>>who has tried to squeeze a basic linux system onto
>>a '386 w/2 megs of ram and a 65 meg hd ?? (grin:-)
^^^^^^^^^^^
On 12/2 and 12/3 I wrote:
>To All;
>The responses to my question have been all but overwhelming !!
>Thank you. If nothing else I sure piqued at least a few people's
>curiousity and definitely my own :-)
>To Richard Adams and the rest who primarily pointed out the
>lack of ram, I was afraid that would be the killer.
It was the KILLER.
Dr. Robert J. Meier wrote:
>As a possible guide to a minimum Linux system, consider
tomsrtbt-1.6.335.
Tried it. It wants 4 megs to boot. Refuses otherwise.
I also tried mulinux - same thing.
tiny linux is an older kernel (1.21 or somewhere) which won't help me
ve2cii <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote the following:
> We have tried it here. You won't run any programs at all on it let
>alone tnos/jnos or any version of nos. I doubt you would would even
>be able to get the ax25 drivers in it. The kernel has to be compiled
>on a seperate machine and then transferred. And all you would be able
>to run is the kernel.
This is as far as I got also. I built a minimal kernal: 386/math emulator
with
ax25builtin. I also figured I'd be tricky and built in ppa to access a
zip
drive and built a minimum system on the zip w/20meg swap (I know,
on an older mach the parallel port is old-dog slow) Well slow is not the
word.
I booted into single user with NO services started, just keyboard
mapping and lo and behold, about 4 - 5 hours later there was a terminal
ready to be used - for nothing. My plan was to format the hard drive,
copy
all over from the zip and then I figured it would boot in about 5-10
minutes
or so. I started fdisk and came back about 2 hours later and it was still
swapping. I then did a 3 finger salute and watched it spend about 3 hours
shutting down. Actually, I pulled the plug after three hours. Sheesh, it
only
takes a minute to run e2fsck on a zip drive - without EPP :-)
I called AST (the computer mfg) and asked about ram - no longer
available and it's an odd number of pins so I probably won't
find any. Too Bad. BUT - it works fine as a DOS box and pakrat
and accesses the linux box with no probs so it is usable. Just not
networked :-(
Many people wrote that they had run it with 4 and 8 megs and so
I replied:
>I too have run it on a 386sx w/4 megs ( 210mb isa drive)
>and quickly upgraded to 8 megs. slo-o-o-o-w at 4, no doubt
>about it. At 8 megs though it runs like a charm and has been
>running 7/24 for many many months w/ax25-utils and xfbb (no X).
>without a problem.
>After all, with Linux the only way to learn and improve the entire
>system (user knowledge, software et al) is by doing.
>(I really love these lists - can you imagine M$ responding this
>quickly and accurately ??).
So to all who are curious - with a newer kernel it's a waste of time.
How much time ?? Well, as the TNOS system will tell you after an ax25
connect:
time connected : 20 minutes
actual computer time: 4 secs
In this case:
my time: approx 2 hrs
actual 386 time: 15 - 20 hrs
( with a very BAD shutdown ...)
So to all: Forget > 2.x.x series kernel with less
than 4 megs of ram - swap or no swap.
See you all around and thanks for the input.
JC
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