According to John C Cusick: While burning my CPU.
>
> Gentlemen and Ladies,
>
> 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:-)
Yes i know a few, one of them is 'me'. (With an even bigger GRIN;-)
65 megs is fine, however the 2m ram will be the BIG problem.
>
> This will act as a portable terminal only for amateur radio.
> Obviously X is not an option.
>
> I'm gonna give it a shot, but I was curious if anyone has ever
> tried it and found out whether it was a waste of time or not.
Well to be honest dont waste your time.
>
> As a terminal, minimal programs and services will be necesary;
> I figure the kernel, mail, telnet, ftp, ax25utils, net-tools and basic
> libs. (if nothing else it will be a learning experience I guess)
>
Running all that on 2 megs of ram (after waiting about 10 to 20 minutes
for the system to boot) will have the following result,
A remote stn calls you via a radio with the ax25 protocol, your system see's
the request and sends a packet, now the fun starts, as soon as there needs
to be any disk activity (remember the system WILL be swapping "heavily")
packets will NOT be answered untill the disk activity is finished, or
the duty cycle from interrupts reaches the radio packet interrupt to be
sent, now considering you will only have 2 megs of ram that could be a
matter of "20 to 30 seconds" depending on how many processes are being run.
So any protocol be it ip or ax25 will have problems with the radio
interrupts.
If your disk is a scsi that will improve the success rate also.
> Any suggestions, caveats, et al will be greatly appreciated.
Now if you could make it 4 megs of ram that would up the sucess rate by 75%.
So basicly yes it can be done, no its not going to work like it should.
Others will have there opinions, these are my experiences, i tryed it a few
years ago on a 386/?? with (at first 2 megs of ram) on a 40 mb disk, that
was with kernel 1.1.40 or something like that, ax25 was at its early
development stage at that point, nowadays the kernel is MUCH larger so the
problems with low memory will have only got more critical.
Anyway thinking about it all, possably there is no distribution which will
even install thesedays with 2 megs of ram.
>
> Please e-mail direct as this address is not directly subscribed
> to a couple of these lists.
>
> Thank You All,
> JC
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--
Regards Richard.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
