[Techtalk] Do I even think about upgrading it?

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2002 at 08:24:45PM -0700 or thereabouts, Dave North wrote:
> Very probably. I am a Debian fan, especially on old hardware, partly
> because it's somewhat easier to run newer packages with an older kernel,
> and there are also a lot of deb folks doing it.
> 	Of course, it's the only distro whose first name is a woman's.
> 	In particular, there are a lot of ways to tweak a setup using the
> 2.2 kernel, partly because Alan Cox is a total small/old hardware dweeb
> (I say that like it's a good thing), and partly because most of the amateurs

Hee. Can I tell him that? :) 

> doodling with small/old machines find it easier to mess with it using Debian.
> The Psion/Linux project, for example, and several others.
> 	End Debian rant. But in this particular case, it's for a reason.
> 	Still, there's enough older stuff floating around for RH that it
> should be possible to crank up some new features without hobbling the old
> beast too much.

Alan has certainly put RHs more recent than 6.0 on some of his weirder
boxes. (One sounds a lot like the description I snipped.) But he knows
what he's doing with the packages and with Anaconda, the installer.
I don't, really. 

So when he gave me one of his cast off tiny boxes I was not entirely
surprised that he said "You'll probably want to put Debian on it". 

It had little RAM and the disk space was measured in Mbs not Gbs. 
Things I had to do to get Debian on included removing groff and 
all its friends, which then removed the man pages too. (So I 
stuck them in the 'man x' section on my RH box for things like 
dpkg and apt :)) I would never have got RH on it on my own. I'd 
have had to ask him. And it was my box now, so I didn't want to. 
Debian went on it fine, and I think it was the best choice on
that box. 

(That box ended up reclaimed for other projects. I've no idea
what it runs now. It may well still be Debian.)

> Just for ducks, I'll bet it would be both possible and highly entertaining
> to put together a very slick system using Gentoo.

Would it not take hours and hours to compile it? I know that on
my Cyrix/233 box with 32Mb, compiling ssh and requirements did
take a very _very_ long time. I now use ssh rather than kernel
compile time as a personal benchmark, because kernels can vary
so much :)

Telsa