Debian on a 386? Unlikely. (was: ramblings about old hardware, gzip, bz2, and pentium opts)

[Brian White <bcwhite@pobox.com>]

> Anyway there are many people using Debian on 386 and 486 machines :(,

I'm not so sure of that any more...  We use a 486-25 at work with 8MB
of RAM and 80MB of disk.  It runs a fine firewall/dial-up server.  In
fact, the only thing it _can't_ do is _upgrade_!  Debian has gotten
sooo big, that I have to make a 4 to 8MB swapfile (8MB swap partition)
just to run dpkg, which is difficult on the limited disk space.  Dselect
takes about 20 mins just to bring up the selection screen.

Of course, I have a 486dx2-66 with 64MB of ram and 2GB disk that runs
Debian just fine.  I doubt there are many 386s out there with more
than the first system, though.

                                          Brian
                                  ( bcwhite@pobox.com )

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