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Re: d-i minimum system requirements



My paraphrased minimum requirements from various sources and some guesses
is at: http://wiki.debian.net/index.cgi?DebianInstallerMinReqs
-----
In response to
  ??? - Where Do you live ???
  In Africa ??? Last Place in Congo ??? (Nice holliday here)
  Or do you install via Cell-Phone and 9600 BpS ???
  ;-)
I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada but sometimes I spend time at Lake of
the Woods where I don't have a good land line.

I'm also looking to get together a computer for a local church and the
best I've found in my budget range is a 16MB 486, single speed CD-ROM
drive. There's a very aggressive "Computers for Schools" program here
which seems to grab all the cheap computers at the Pentium level. Also try
finding cheap large RAM SIMMS for a 486. Ebay would be good if it weren't
for shipping costs...

I've also managed to dig up two other 486's for which I'm personally
interested in maintaining... I believe in reuse before refuse.

I've seen others comment on debian-devel that they still use 486's for
routers and alike. There were at least some grumblings when 386 support
was dropped from iirc the C++ library, and I know there were grumblings
about the speed of the Kernel with 486 emulation on 386's, not to mention
the few K of "bloat".

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>From all of this I've basically learned that the best way to find out is
to give it a try.

I'm still curious though as to how hard it would be to create an
installer that could have a ramdisk with just enough to create a hard
drive partition and then have the installer use that? This would probably
impose the burden of restarting the computer, managing another ramdisk
image with it's related software (d-i installer?), and adding hard drive
support into the installer... likely at least a bit of a mess.

     Drew Daniels



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