[PLUG] Distro Suggestions?

Carlos Konstanski ckonstanski at pippiandcarlos.com
Mon Aug 13 00:55:21 UTC 2007


On Sun, 12 Aug 2007, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> Date: Sun, 12 Aug 2007 17:40:36 -0700
> From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb at cesmail.net>
> Reply-To: "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> To: "General Linux/UNIX discussion and help;	civil and on-topic"
>     <plug at lists.pdxlinux.org>
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Distro Suggestions?
> 
> john morgali wrote:
>> I have a very old Toshiba Portege.  It is very small,
>> thin, and light. It has a magnesium case, and is very
>> convenient to tote around.
>
> I'd start with Damn Small. I have a Toshiba Libretto with even less
> horsepower (Pentium MMX 133 MHz, 1.5 GB hard drive, 32 MB of RAM) that I
> bought with Windows 95 on it. I lost the W95 install floppies, but I
> managed to get DOS 5.0 onto it and from there to bootstrap Debian Woody
> on it. IIRC it was using a KDE 2.x desktop -- I haven't brought it up
> recently.
>
> You can probably get Etch to load on it over the network if you can boot
> either a floppy or a CD ROM -- the Libretto couldn't boot CD-ROMs and
> could only boot DOS and Windows floppies, which I why I had to use DOS
> 5.0 to get install images onto the hard drive. But if you can boot a
> CD-ROM, Damn Small should work.
>
> So, for that matter, should a Gentoo 50 MB basic install CD. Gentoo is
> probably going to be easier to strip, since you can build a lightweight
> kernel rather than having to use the pre-built one that just might be
> too big.
>
> As far as a desktop is concerned, I think Damn Small still uses Fluxbox,
> but IceWM should also work. I don't know about the others, like
> WindowMaker/GNUstep, Afterstep or Enlightenment -- they may be too heavy
> for only 32 MB of RAM.

I'm not sure I agree with using gentoo, unless you want to do some
off-the-wall things to help bring down the root filesystem size.  You
could NFS mount /usr/portage to another machine, as well as
/var/db/pkg and /var/tmp/portage.  But it seems simpler from a
maintainence standpoint to use a distro that you can update without
gymnastics.  Perhaps you never intend to update it, though.  I'll bet
that the size of the portage files is greater than the size of the
debian bloat-kernel.

Why choose gentoo over debian?  The #1 reason is architecture-specific
builds.  With a CPU that supports no more than the standard x86
architecture and has no mmx or sse instruction sets, is gentoo worth
the hassle?  This is coming from the self-proclaimed number one
diehard gentoo fanatic in the world.  Naturally I would use gentoo for
this project.

Which browser to use?  Here I am at a loss, for any mozilla-like
browser will eat 50M RAM in a hurry.

Carlos Konstanski



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