[Techtalk] Do I even think about upgrading it?

[Dave North]

me:
> > partly because Alan Cox is a total small/old hardware dweeb
> > (I say that like it's a good thing)
telsa:
> Hee. Can I tell him that? :)

Few things would please me more than to have something nice I've said
about Mr. Cox get back to him and give some small pleasure -- he has been
so generous with his time and enthusiasm. I consider him a big asset to
the human race.
	That means, of course, yes yes yes!

> 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.

Me too neither.

> 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".

That, of course, doesn't surprise me at all. As Alan's example points out,
I'm sure you can do wonders with RedHat on just about any machine -- if
you know what Alan does (and it's sort of part of your job, wink*nod).
	It's just that a bunch of us think it's a lot easier with Debian.
	I'm very gratified he agreed, at least back then.


> 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 sacrified some other things ... partly I used it for reading various
(and sometimes random) man pages in my spare time. Called it "man
roulette."
	And thoroughly learning bc on the way to some function in Oakland.

> Would it not take hours and hours to compile [gentoo on a small box]?

I'm sure it would. You'd probably have to sort of plan out a roadmap and
do things on a day-to-day basis. It would be a major pain, I'm sure.
	This is looking better and better....

> I now use ssh rather than kernel compile time as a personal benchmark

If I'm really serious (well, make that a relative term. Serious is not a
natural state) I use Mozilla. It takes long enough on any system to give a
fine comparison percentage, and at the end I get something new every
time...


d