distribution options for older systems (was: Re: While of on the subject of ideas for programs.)

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

See below for interspersed responses.

At 07:26 AM 7/5/99 -0400, Rob Bellville wrote [in part]:

>Also, on the subject of installing from CD-ROM, would actually copying the
>filesystem from the CD be an option?  Or, can an image be transferred to
>the HD? Once the system has been transferred a script could be run to do
>the hardware tweaks if any.

You don't even have to transfer the system, if you have decently fast CD-ROM
drives. Slackware includes a "Live" distribution on its Official CDs (the
4-disk set you get from Walnut Creek CD-ROM). They bill it as "the ultimate
rescue disk" -- a complete Linux system that runs directly from the CD. I
forget nowif it creates a small ramdisk or uses a dos directory for the
things that have to be writable (e.g., log files) and how it handles things
like the /proc filesystem, but it's surely a place to start. (The only
problem is that the cheapie 1-disk Slackwares no longer include it, for
space reasons. But it is GPL'd and could be redistributed -- it's just that
since it only comes on the official sets, people are less familiar with ht
than they once were.)

If the CD drives are too slow for this to be reasonable (or if the machines
don't have CD drives and you need to access a CD drive via NFS), you can
still use this approach to build a filesystem that can be quickly reloaded.
(My main use of Slackware live in the past was to pick up the occasional
file that, for some reason, I'f forgotten to install -- much quicker than
going back to pkgtool.)

>
>Just for infomational purposes, most of my donations come with 8 MB of RAM.
>I'll also assume that most other schools get them this way too. There has
>to be a way to slim down XWindows or some alternative GUI to work??? Pardon
>me while I wake up from my dream. <grin>

People talk about this on other lists that I'm on. Some posters -- typically
high school students (I suppose because they have more time than money)
describe ways they've made X work on 8-meg systems (even occasionally on
'386s). They also admit that performance is lousy, with lots of swapping ...
I'd suspect slow enough that users in a school setting would complain. 8-meg
system really are, at best, potential X terminals in any realistic application.

I know it seems wasteful, but if these machines are really as minimal as you
keep saying, I'd be looking at turning two crummy machines into one decent
one, by stripping the memory and hard disk from one and adding it to another
-- giving you half as many in the end, but each with 16 megs RAM and 300
megs HD. (This assumes RAM and drives that can be consolidated; not all can be.)

A limiting consideration you haven't mentioned is the quality of the video.
Older video cards can only run the VGA16 X server, which to my eye is below
the quality that users would accept for general-purpose use. Do you know if
you have video cards in them (and, for that matter, monitors) that will run
the SVGA server?



------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA  94303-3603    	 	        ray@comarre.com        
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