Douglas A. Tutty wrote: > Hello all, > > I have a 486DX4-100 with 32 MB ram. I bought an 8 GB drive to put in my > P-II and it won't boot it so I've put in in the 486 along with a 1 GB > drive.
you might want to spend more time on that PII system... > I'm on dialup and would like to avoid a bad partitioning decision > requring a whole new install/download cycle (I'm on slow dialup). Ouch. ... > The box has two drives, both Western Digital. One is 8.1 GB, the other > is 1.1. I'll be installing 4.1 release then installing the patches and > following their instructions re rebuilding. have you tested that 1G WD drive? Those were curiously cranky, reliable drives. Yes, that's what I meant to say: some years ago, I became the proud owner of something like 60 machines with those drives in them, ranging from never having been powered up (still had factory load on 'em!) to being very heavily used. The majority did not spin up on their own, but if you manually "twisted" them, they would fire up and stay running...until you turned 'em off long enough to cool back down. > Here's what I'm thinking: ...[snip a very functional plan] > Do you think that this will give me all the room I need to install and > keep patched: > > full install > icewm or Xfce > Konqueror on a 486?? > Firefox on a 486? With 32M RAM??? 18489 nick 2 0 73M 93M sleep poll 313:36 0.10% firefox-bin No freaking way. I don't like running Firefox on my 850MHz laptop. > a pdf reader or two (Evince, Kpdf, Xpdf) > mplayer on a 486? > mc > mutt > vim > > Yes, I know that compiles will take forever and a day, but hopefully I > won't be recompiling much; I need the space in case its required. Not just compiles. Most of those apps just won't run on a 486 in anything more than a "oh, look, it came up!" sort of way. > Are these partitions a good size in the right order or are they any > suggestions for improvement? your (partitioning) plan is not bad, but here are some thoughts: Assuming your 1G drive works and you don't bust your knuckles spinning the thing up manually (don't ask), don't use it on this system, but rather use it to place all the install files on. That way, you don't have to do it "right" the first time. Load it up on another machine (or on this machine before you remove its current OS). Put it in as the secondary drive on the system, boot off floppy, point the install media to the 1G drive as the source for the files (it will read FAT and FAT32). Every time you download a new package, put it on this drive. More reality checks: 1) Many 486 machines have only one IDE port. 2) Many 8G drives don't want to work as a secondary to a 1G drive (but the 1G drive will probably work fine as a secondary to a 8G) 3) IF you get X running on this thing, you will very possibly find that quits working for 4.2. Many old systems like this will need XF3, as XF4 and X.org don't support many of the old drivers. XF3 is gone for 4.2 (and there was much rejoicing). 4) At best, this thing will be an X terminal for you, you won't run many X apps on it. 5) You probably don't know how to configure an ISA NIC 6) I'm trying to forget how to configure an ISA NIC (damn flashbacks) 7) You don't want to know what I will hopefully be putting out on the curb for trash day ..er..next week, since I'm spending tonight answering email. 8) with 32M RAM, swap will be your friend. You need to get out more and meet better friends. This is going to be a really frustrating machine to learn OpenBSD on. Learning almost always requires making "mistakes" (even if completely intentionally made!). OpenBSD will run on a 486 better than just about any other OS now, but that's not saying much at all, unfortunately. Just logging into the machine will be painful. I wish there was an economical way to get some of the stuff I toss out to some of the people in the world who would love to have it. Nick.
