[Techtalk] Do I even think about upgrading it?

[hobbit at aloss.ukuu.org.uk]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2002 at 12:44:15PM -0700 or thereabouts, Dave North wrote:
> 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!

He laughed.

> > 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.

I have had people see me with FreeBSD CDs under my arm and ask me
in all seriousness whether Alan would "allow" me to run it. They
are generally surprised to learn that the only "power" he exercises
over what runs in this house is:
    * If it's not RH, he won't spend hours working out how $otherdistro
does it to help me, although he might come and look out of curiosity.
    * If I put Windows on a box, it would have to come off the LAN
(security...) 

Since I have no intention of using Windows, this second is not
exactly a worry.

That said, I asked him about RH on the very small PC110 (a 486SLC
with 20Mb RAM and a tiny tiny screen which will do X in 640x480:
it's actually only barely larger than an iPaq and comes with lots
of funky Japanese characters on the keys).

He said he cheats :) He has a tool called sysgen which installs
minimal RH 7.2 setups onto a hard disk: you put the disk into a
slightly more useful box than the PC110, run 'sysgen', and put
the disk back into the PC110.

(I didn't know any of this!) 

That provides a basic RH 7.2 with X, rvxt and Sylpheed and then he
adds XFce for a pretty X which doesn't munch the RAM he has(n't)
got.

It lives at ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/linux/alan/ somewhere.
And XFce is at http://www.xfce.org

I asked him about Caity's box and he said a 2.4.18-ac kernel
(or any kernel with rmap) tends to outperform 2.2 on a low-memory
box. It uses more memory, but swaps the right stuff out when it's
under load. He's actually written a short guide to Linux and low
powered boxes, but clearly he hasn't put it up anyway :) 

I shall send it separately to techtalk if people are interested:
it's what the limitations for Linux on little or old boxes are 
and how to get around them.

Telsa