Re: [seul-edu] Basic System Wish List (SMTP)

[Colin Dellow <plarf@moo.ca>]

> The problem is that the machines are 8 meg RAM 486 - smallish
> hardrives (40 megs?) and a 1.44 floppy.  Currently they have bare
> bones DOS.
Ouch, that's tough.  Peanut Linux (http://www.ibiblio.org/peanut/) would
probably require about 120Mb of disk space.

Personally, I would suggest compiling a custom kernel with as _few_
features as possible -- get it down to under 400k if possible.

My installation of XFree86 (3.3.6) uses 56Mb of space.  Unless you
are *really* good at trimming files, you won't be able to use it.

However, you could still use pico (166KB) and perl (15MB).  I couldn't find
any console-based spreadsheets, so you're out of luck there, I'm afraid.

40Mb is tight to work with, regardless of your operating system. 
If you want to make the machines do something really worthwhile, you'll
need a bigger harddrive, or a network connection.

It's sad, really -- you don't need all the oomph of a 40GB drive,
1GB would be perfect and even 300MB would be doable.  Could
you ask local businesses about this?

The second option is network connections.  With 6 network cards
(figure $20 each) linked into a hub (figure $70) linked into a server
computer (figure at least $500) you could, theoretically, turn those
machines into something useful.  They'd suffer a performance hit as
they would have to load programs from the network and receive
display information from the network

This would still require some shoehorning -- you need to fit
an X server onto that hard drive.  Of course, ensure that you
can do this before going out and buying hardware. ;)

If you want a GUI, you'd have to spend $690.  That's a shame, but
it would resurrect some PCs from the dead.  If you can't afford to
do this, I'm afraid you're going to be stuck with simple text editing
and programming.  Don't get me wrong though, I would have been
very, very happy if my school had six computers with pico and perl
on them.  But then, I'm a geek. :)

Good luck with whatever course you pursue!
-- 
-- Colin Dellow
	plarf@moo.ca  - "Programming is like sex: one mistake and you
			 have to support it for the rest of your life."
			 	- Michael Sinz