On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 06:40:42PM -0500, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
> It was thus said that the Great Shawn T. Rutledge once stated:
> >
> > On Thu, Feb 10, 2000 at 03:59:26PM -0600, Bill Richman wrote:
> > > in them. What I've decided to do for terminals around the house (including
> > > the kitchen and bathroom) is to buy some old 486 laptops with color displays
> > > and PCMCIA slots. I've got PCMCIA ethernet cards for them, and am shopping
> > > for PCMCIA sound cards. My plan is to run Linux or FreeBSD on them, and
> > > X-windows,
>
> Be warned, while you can run Linux with 4M of RAM, installing Linux with
> 4M of RAM isn't easy. It took me the better part of a day to install Linux
> on a Toshiba T1900C with 4M RAM and 120M harddrive (a half-baked manual
> installtion of RedHat using Tom's Root/Doot disk and an existing RedHat
> system) and a 3Com modem/ethernet PCMCIA card (and it's currently hooked
> into the network at home).
>
> The RedHat install requires 16M of RAM. The oldest Slackware distribution
> I found (3.3) required 8M to do a floppy based install. Don't even attempt
> to run X if you have less than 16M and even then, you going to have to use
> an older window manager like twm or fvwm/fvwm2.
Yeah if I was going to try to make do with 4 megs I'd try to cook up a
customized distro using some older code. TinyX can run in 4 megs in theory
but the web page warns that you may not be able to run more than 1 app
at a time. :-) But running all apps from a remote server should help.
I think with 8 megs you could run just about anything you want remotely.
TomsRTBT has some really small utils too. Whole collections of utilities
are implemented as symlinks to a single executable, and the executable
looks at the command line to figure out which utility to run. There's a
similar package listed at freshmeat called "busybox" but I'm not sure if
that's what Toms uses. libc5 and a.out are also a good thing in a small
amount of memory especially if there aren't going to be a lot of processes
running at once (elf has overhead but saves memory if the same lib is
linked to multiple executables that are running at once). Somewhere
I have a slackware so old that it uses a 1.0 series kernel. It has light
memory requirements but nothing I could do would make it work in 2 megs
of RAM like I wanted to do with those 386's. The kernel would load but
there wasn't enough memory left to run init. :-)
An idea I bounced off one of the mailing lists was what if code could run
in-place directly off the "hard drive" (FLASH in my case) without having to
be loaded in memory first. But AFAIK noone has done this yet. My guess
is it would involve modifying the loader (in the kernel or in libc? Not
sure which) to instead do an mmap and return a pointer to that space.
But I gave up thinking about it and resigned myself to make do with DOS
and build a custom lightweight GUI framework. At least the metawidgets
concept is very portable, moreso than X even.
>
> If anyone is interested I can go into more details about how I installed
> Linux on the Toshiba (in total spent about three, four days trying to get
> *anything* installed on the box).
FWIW my first Linux box was a 386 with 5 megs. So slackware really did used
to run in that just fine. I was using a 1.2 series kernel then.
>
> > Sounds like great fun. Personally I'm hooked on touchscreens though.
> > Haven't got it working yet because cheap deals on touchscreens always seem
> > to come with caveats...
>
> At the Miami Ham fest earlier this month, I came across this one table
> where the guy was selling a prototype Linux PDA. IBM made these touch
> screen computers (basically they look like a thich LCD screen and are jet
> black) with a stylus. He slapped a 1G harddrive and installed Debian Linux
> on the thing. To Linux it looks like a standard PC, but it was a (I think)
> 33 MHz 486 with 8 or 16M RAM and a 1G drive. He wanted $250 for it.
> Tempting, but decided for the Sun 3/80 at another booth.
Neato. I'd have the equivalent with my 730T if there were such a thing
as a gigabyte PCMCIA type III hard drive. Biggest I've seen is 540 megs,
and on ebay they are really expensive. BTW anybody got any PCMCIA drives
for sale of any size? Well I'll start another thread about that...
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Received on Thu Feb 10 2000 - 22:42:12 GMT