On Sun, Mar 25, 2007 at 12:44:46PM -0400, Nick Holland wrote: > Shawn K. Quinn wrote: > > On Fri, 2007-03-23 at 10:49 -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: > >> On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 06:56:32AM -0500, Shawn K. Quinn wrote: > >> > On Wed, 2007-03-21 at 22:37 -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote: > >> > > > >> > > I've got a 486DX4-100 with 32 MB ram, ISA bus, with two drives: 840 MB > >> > > and 1280 MB IDE. Currently running Debian GNU/Linux Sarge. > >> > > 32M is at a point where if it isn't enough, you need a better machine. > Tweaking the kernel to make it run "better" in 32M is just perfume on the > pig. If that's what you need to do, get a less smelly pig. > > As I indicated recently, probably on this thread, ssh on a 486 is painful. > Works fine, but painfully slow. >
> X? oh, ick. It will work, but you may need the XF3 support, as a lot of > old, 486-vintage video chips haven't been ported to X.org. If you need to > use the XF3 servers, you will be out of luck starting with OpenBSD v4.2, > as (hopefully) we will have switched to Xenocara, and probably drop XF3 > support. > > I believe at some point, it was indicated that this 486 is or may be the > OP's first OpenBSD experience. If that is true, I'd highly recommend a > better machine to get your feet wet with. > > MY recommendation for minimum HW for OpenBSD for a first-timer would be > a Pentium, 100MHz or better, 32M RAM or better. If you want X, I'd bump > that up to a P200, 64M RAM or better. Again, it isn't that it won't run > on slower machines, it is just that you will skip important steps in the > learning process if your machine is too slow. > Right now, I only have two boxes: my 486 and my Athlon. The Athlon runs Debian Etch amd64. Its the box that does all my work so I don't want to get on a BSD learning curve on it. The 486 is only a convenience piece. Yes, X is a problem no matter Debian or BSD. Right now, the 486 has Debian Sarge on it but I've tweaked the XFree86 configs so it uses the previous versions S3 driver since its not available for the current version. That wont be an option in Debian Etch eiter. Bottom line, I may have to give up on X. Its not that great a loss. Debian's Sarge installer doesn't work on it and neither will Etch's. If ever I need to reinstall or change something fundamental (e.g. the hard drive crashes), I have to install woody base and upgrade. The trouble is that its a pain to do that over dial-up. This is one of my reasons for looking at OpenBSD. So I want to learn BSD on the 486. As for taking a long time to install, everything is relative. It takes a long time to upgrade Debian over dial-up too. I _think_ I can download the tarballs from the ftp site, burn them onto a CD so I have a local repository to point the install at, then I _think_ the time-consuming thing is something about generating keys. Assuming that it can do that without me sitting there, I can get it started then go camping :) Besides, I'm a bit attached to my trusty 486. It has never given me a moments trouble (hardware wise) since I bought it new from IBM in 1993/4. My P-100 is so unreliable its unusable except as a terminal emulator. My PII was given to me full of cat hair; not one fan turned. It dies after 45 seconds. The 486 runs quiet, cool, and error free. My only concern is that I upgraded the memory from 8 MB to 16 then 32 and in the process of SIMM swapping, I don't have IBM ECC memory anymore. Rather than compare it to a smelly pig, try an old uncle. I want to get BSD on it before it gets Alzheimer's (memory loss) or Parkinson's (as in Parkinson's Law about available space). Then there's aesthetics. I learn best by understanding. Since UNIX culture was born on slow (by today's standards) machines, why not learn in that mode to start? What steps would I skip if my machine is too slow if I'm dedicated to learning on it and not trying to cut corners to make it run faster? Once I have a working OpenBSD system and learn about it, I can decide if I want to make the switch on my Athlon. Thanks for your comments. Doug.
