On Wednesday 31 July 2002 03:57 am, you wrote: > [...] > Sitting next to me at this very moment is a 386dx40+copro > with 8mb RAM. As I type this, I am playing xfreecell > (800x600) on that machine. Multi-card moves are somewhat > lackadaisical, but single-card moves are reasonably snappy. > The game is definitely playable.
It's been interesting over the last couple of years watching Linux users go down the hardware upgrade path that has long been associated with Windows. Not too many years ago, even the "big" distributions could load on a 386 or 486 with no fuss. I hardly blame distributors for aiming for the mainstream market (they ARE profit-oriented), but the "common knowledge" even among moderately savvy users these days seems to lean towards "requiring" more hardware. Hey, if it's cheap and available, great but I'm glad to see efforts like BL to keep in touch with the "low resource roots" of Linux, even if it's not my particular cup of tea. Alan's article was interesting to me in that it focused on libraries, hardware, kernel compile options and other options that let even 2.4 kernels run well on small(ish) systems. I personally like the 2.4 kernel for the ability to create a solid soho gateway/firewall, and doing it on older hardware makes perfect sense. > Even on a 386 with 8mb RAM, icewm is smooth and stable. > I am pleasantly surprised. [...] Unfortunately, I've had to get rid of most of my REALLY old PC hardware due to heat and space constraints, so my low-end for testing now is a P120 with 32MB RAM (laptop). I'd be curious to see what it takes to run AbiWord or other "smallish" apps well on a cramped system. I hope to have some time to try a debian configuration tweaked per Alan's article to see how it fares. - Bob To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html