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RE: Compact version for running on 486/33 or /66 with 8->32 Mb ram



> While worming through the pages I found a reference to
> a compact verison of Debian installation that was
> designed to work on a 486.

Slink works on a 486. I'm running it on two 486 DX2 at home. One with 8MB of
ram, which is too little, one with 20MB which is plenty.

The 20MB ram machine has a 200MB disk of which about 60 is swap. On the rest
is one partition. I installed "basic machine ~25MB" then added the stuff I
needed. /usr/src is mounted over nfs (I always build the smallest possible
working kernel as soon as the machine is up and running). I seem to remember
not installing some of the suggested documentation packages. There is still
free space on the disk, but /home is more or less empty.

The 8MB ram machine has a 2.5GB disk of which 128MB is swap and the rest is
one big partition. Again I installed "basic machine ~25MB" then added things
a bit at a time. On this machine /home is mounted over nfs. Previusly this
machine had 24MB of ram and ran X and numerous applications (e.g. LyX)
satisfactorily. Now with less ram I find it swaps too much to run X, even X
clients are rather hampered - I reconfigured this machine solely to cut
CDroms; which it does successfully from cdwrite but xcdroast produces
coasters due to timeouts from swapping. The 2.5GB disk is mostly empty most
of the time but I want to use it to store iso9660 file system images between
cuts.

As long as you don't need to run the gimp, just install the minimum to do
what you want and avoid unnecessary daemons (apache, x font server, etc) a
486 can be a reasonable linux box.

Andrew


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