Re: REALLY small machine
On Tue, 14 Jul 1998, Robert Henry Rati wrote:
> I have an old 384 with 40 meg HD and 1 meg of ram and I wanted to set it
> up as my ftp server. Can Linux install into that small a HD and if so,
> how would I go about doing that?
Linux can be booted in less than 1 meg, but you can't do much with it in
that state, and you have to very very carefully craft your kernel to do
it. Probably 2 megs is the smallest useful amount of RAM for Linux. You
can install into 40MB of disk, though you'll probably want more. As
jgreshes noted, old hard drives are very cheap now, even free if you do a
little scavenging.
Another alternative is installing just the minimum system and NFS
mounting the rest from a beefier computer, but then I think you'll want
4MB of RAM to get acceptable performance.
There are several license restrictions on it, but you may want to look at
Minix-386. It's another (mostly) free unix-like OS, written for
educational purposes. It's a lot smaller than Linux (though it has a lot
fewer features) and some versions can even run on an 8086. It should run
comfortably on 1MB of RAM, and I know it fits easily into 40MB of disk.
Hardware support, particularly for networking stuff, is very limited, but
you might get lucky.
Unfortunately, ELKS (the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset) is still being
developed, and networking in particular is not at all usable right now.
Keep checking, though...
Sincerely,
Ray Ingles (248) 377-7735 ray.ingles@fanucrobotics.com
"Technically, Windows is an operating system, which means that it
supplies your computer with the basic commands it needs to suddenly,
with no warning whatsoever, stop operating." - Dave Barry
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