Life at 4 bogomips
Well I got the old 386 put back together, figured I would use it for a
firewall. 386SX33 with 10MB of RAM. Man, what an example to show what OS
bloat has done! I used to install Win31 on it, even installed OS/2 Warp
on it. Now it is running Debian and MAN is it S-L-O-W.
In dselect the Scanning available packages .......... part puts out about
one dot every three seconds.
It will probably take overnight to install from CDROM. I thought Linux
was supposed to be snappy on old hardware? Or at LEAST as fast as Windows.
The kernel seems fast enough but the distro-specific stuff is pretty
doggy.
Running modconf ... where it looks to see which modules are available
(like, almost any time you hit a key) ... go get a cup of coffee. Why
can't it remember which modules it saw the last time it looked?
Man, I think maybe the maintainers should be forced to install their stuff
on a 386 just to get some perspective. CPU horsepower sure can cover up
inefficient code. Or to put it another way, an system without any CPU
horsepower sure exposes the inefficiencies.
I guess I won't be compiling any kernels on that box ... well, maybe ONE
just to see how long it takes.
:)
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