Re: linux

["Richard E. Hawkins Esq." <hawk@eyry.econ.iastate.edu>]

> I have a 486 pc  with 248MB harddrive space and 16MB Ram memory.
> I want to turn this pc in a mailserver running under linux.

> Can you tell me if i have enough space on my harddisk to fit both the
> minimum required packages (to ask as mailserver) and MS-dos.

> Which packages do i need ???

More than enough room, but, as has been pointed out, if it's a 
mailserver, you can't take it down to use dos (so use dosemu.  even so, 
a small dos partition might be nice; i found a chicken & egg problem 
with doseme and the included freedos).

Anyway, I installed the full base installation, X,  and swap on 
machines with two 80mb drives and 8M.  Come to think of it, i also had 
gcc, g++, kernel source, and lyx source installed.  Oh, and that hog, 
emacs.  Bug that was about as far as I could push it, iirc.

Just do a base installation, let it install the default files by cd or 
ftp, and you'll have all you need.  If you're going to download the 
files, and it currently has dos internet capacity, i'd make the 32mb 
partition to become swap as a second dos partition, downoload resc1440, 
drv1440, base2_1.tgz (sp), and rawrite2 into this partition.  Use 
rawrite to make the resc1440 disk, and leave the rest of the files 
there.

boot from resc1440.  When it offers to partition, delete the first, 
partition and put a linux partition there.  leave the second be, and 
tell it to do without a swap partition.  When you get to the "install" 
whatever part, tell it that the files are on /dev/hda2.  After it 
installs the base files, you can delete the partition and use it for 
swap, but i'd wait until you've rebooted successfully, just in case you 
need them again.

There's also a program (ldlinux? loadlin?) to boot linux from dos, 
meaning you wouldn't need any disks, but would boot from the resc1440 
image, but I've never used it.

rick

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