Re: Floppy X

[Mark Eichin <eichin@cygnus.com>]

> To log into X you must have (at least):

You can trim it some -- 
	* you don't need xdm -- just log in on a tty and run startx.
	* Then you don't need xauth either. 
	* rxvt is supposed to be smaller than xterm, but not enough to
		be worth the problems.
	* fvwm is 30K smaller than twm, again no big deal.
	* seperate out the fonts -- have fixed, maybe one or two others,
		after all they might be on the net using a fontserver...

Then again, I get 2.2M for XF86_VGA16, but that's from
xserver-3.1.2-3...  still, strip+gzip gets it down to 960K, which
might be enough (we're talking about installing from floppy, not
running from floppy, anyway... running from two floppies is just as
unlikely as running from 7 :-)

Note that if we want small, and we've already got perl, we can drop
xrdb, since I've got a minimal perl Xlib (raw perl, no libraries) that
can do an xrdb directly. Then again, we can drop xrdb anyway --
anything local can read ~/.Xresources, and if you've got remote
clients, then you can install xrdb from the net too.

Anyway, lib*.6.0 + XF86_VGA16 + twm + xterm, fed through
strip/tar/gzip -9, is 1.7M. Just a little too big for one floppy[1],
but you can then add a batch of fonts to fill two... oh, and some
config scripts of course (but they compress well :-)

However, this is just for a *minimal* installation. You'd really want
to install a *real* X installation (from CDROM of course - you can get
CDROM drives as low as $80 these days[2].)

					_Mark_ <eichin@cygnus.com>
					Cygnus Support, Eastern USA

[1] 3.5" 1.44M floppy. With clever block size tweaking, you might be
able to fit it on a 3.5" floppy with a non-standard format. 5.25"
floppies are "archaic" like 8", and even the CP/M diehards have
figured out how to replace 8" drives with 3.5" drives :-)
[2] http://www.jemcomputers.com/biz/bargains, mail order surplus.