Re: [seul-edu] appropriate lightweight distribution

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 06:41:47PM -0500, cfm@maine.com wrote:
> > I should try a ?light weight? distribution such as Slackware.  I was unaware
> > that there were any differences in distributions from a hardware requirement
> > standpoint.  Can anyone suggest a distribution for this purpose?
> 
> P133 will work, 16MB will work only in console mode, forget X.  More
> ram and you could run X but your would need more disk too, or NFS.

The Linux kernel has been getting steadily heavier. I used to run a
486 dx2-50 with 16 megs of ram and a 400 meg drive, with the 1.0, 1.2,
and then 2.0 kernel series. I used X, had multiple users, ran several
web and ftp sites, and had no problems. I was using Red Hat 4.2.

Seul itself ran on an amd 586/133 with 32 megs of ram and a 2 gig hard
drive, for something like 2 years. We served millions of web hits monthly,
and had a dozen developers on the machine. Again, no problems.

Don't underestimate what Linux can do for you. :) On the other hand,
with a 2.4 kernel and things like KDE or Gnome, there's no way you will
get them to run comfortably with 16 megs of ram.

Consider looking at http://tiny.seul.org/ for a slackware variant that
we've heard good things about. Slackware is traditionally better for
slower machines, because it has older (and thus smaller and faster)
versions of things. Of course, you'll want to get the new versions of
the productivity applications for users. :) But a 2.0 kernel will be
just fine for you, for example.

1 gig of disk space is actually a whole lot of disk space. You would
make these machines *much* better by popping in another 16 meg simm.

--Roger