Re: Oops. 1 Gig Recommendation 2nd try.
<quote who="Richard Flood">
> Yes, it appears that I am installing higher level packages that
> eat up a lot of room. The development tools was huge and included
> things like perl, and several things I hadn't heard of. Perhaps I just
> needed to break open these packages and pull out the
> specifics.
better to just install what you want..use apt-get and apt-cache if
your on debian to search..
>
> Is the crash when I put it into the laptop more likely because of the
> lack of a swap partition or because of the foreign hardware
> config?
more likely lack of swap partition, 16MB is such a little amount
of ram ...
>
> Yes, I picked KDE because it wasn't as big as gnome. Any
> recommendations on the best petite graphical interface?
I wouldn't use either KDE or gnome on that kind of machine.
I set my sister up with Dual P2-233 with 384MB of ram and KDE and
gnome were barely useable. I replaced it with a P3-500 with 512MB
of ram and they are just a bit more barely useable. I need
a somewhat snappy interface so i use afterstep. xfce as another
mentioned is pretty good too, though blackbox will probably
be much leaner.. I can't imagine running X on 16MB.. my
lowest memory machine is 64MB and it runs X, but only 1
application with no windowmanager and i don't interact with
it.
>
> Finally, you offer advice as if it doesn't matter whether I use
> Mandrake or Debian. Is that your opinion? Or are you just being
> magnanimous not to discourage?
i try to be neutral when i can. I haven't used mandrake since
7.1 i think, back then it had a lot of eye candy and some real
nice features, but I found the distribution as a whole quite
fragile. I had to hack up the init scripts to get DHCP working
for example(if the machine was setup for dHCP when it was installed
it worked, but if it was installed with static then later
changed to dhcp using drakconf it failed). There was a few more
things i had to do to the systems at the time to keep them running.
Which is why i gave my sister SuSE 7.3/8. it may not have all the
fancy stuff that mandrake has but in my experience, overall it
is more solid then mandrake.
debian is fine too, i use it on most all the machines I use.
but is in general more difficult to install on exotic hardware.
(e.g. my debian 2.2 cds won't even boot in 2 of my company's
newer laptops, the bios just says BOOT FAILED. SuSE works
on both..I haven't tried the debian 3.0 installer yet).
depending on what your going to be doing would depend on
what system I'd reccomend to someone. If your doing a lot
of desktop work and don't have much linux/unix knowldge,
SuSE, if your going to be really getting into linux then
debian/slackware, if you just want to play around and don't
have important information on the system and don't care about
reinstalling, mandrake. (mandrake's situation may of changed
since 7.x though ....)
with a laptop that old, Xfree may not even support it. try
to find out at their website www.xfree86.org, you may need
a commercial X server like Metro-X or AcceleratedX to get
X running.
I had an old laptop a while back, 486-100 with 8MB of ram,
got debian 2.1 on it and X running via AcceleratedX, it worked
but it wasn't usable in X, way too slow and the screen was
too small(640x480).
X doesn't become useful to me till it gets to 1024x768
nate
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