Re: Laptop 386dx40 with 4 MByte and 40 MByte
On Wed, 20 Nov 2002, Wookey wrote:
> On Wed 20 Nov, David B Harris wrote:
> > On Wed, 20 Nov 2002 14:09:59 +0200
> > Michelle Konzack <linux.mailinglists@freenet.de> wrote:
> > > Hello laptop.deb's,
> > >
> > > I have gotten a NEW OLD LAptop and I like to install Debian.
> > > MS-Dos 6.2 was no problem, but... it's a Microsoft product.
> > >
> > > Which Version of Debian is recommended ?
> > >
> > > bo, hamm, slink, potatop or woody ?
> > >
> > > Oh yes, I have no CD and no lpd-port. Only one Floppy and mono-display.
> > >
> > > Generaly I like to run Lyx, a webbrowser and a MUA like balsa.
> >
> > With only four megs of memory, you'll not be able to run any of those
> > versions listed.
>
> There is a whole 4mb-laptop HOWTO, which shows that it is possible to run
> Linux on such machines, but it's true - in practice doing much useful in a
> 4MB machine requires an 'embedded device' mentality, and Debian is not
> really set up for that as supplied. And most embedded devices these days
> have a lot more than 4MB RAM :-)
>
> Woody has been installed on an 16MB Psion5mx with 64MB CF card, but you
> wouldn't want anything much smaller.
You can certainly get by with only 8Megs RAM. The way I do this is by
getting a really old linux, say, redhat 5.x, and installing that. Export
the drive over NFS, get a remote computer to 'rm -rf' the redhat install,
copy (some of the) the debian system from the remote computer. Specify all
the packages you want on the small-RAM computer by doing a "dpkg --get
selections > small-packages.txt ; emacs small-packages.txt ; dpkg
--set-selections < small-packages.txt", chrooting to the small-RAM
computer's NFS mount, and doing a dpkg-upgrade.
About a day's work.
A kinda HOW-TO is here:
http://www.astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/code/nfs-bind.txt
My small RAM box works beautifully now. Not too shabby as a NFS server and
firewall.
--
TimC -- http://astronomy.swin.edu.au/staff/tconnors/
If my head were spinning at relativistic speeds,
it would appear to everyone else that my brane had slowed down.
(unattributed, because it so accurately describes me)
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