[PLUG] Fedora 14 vs. 2005 laptop

[Keith Lofstrom]

At the Clinic on sunday, a fellow brought in his Compaq R4000 
laptop, and a Fedora 14 install disk, intending to combine
them.  The R4000 is a large beast with a big screen, but
the RAM and disk and optical drives on the various R4000
versions range from pretty good to pathetic. 

Unfortunately, his R4000 had 200MB of RAM, a 40GB hard disk, and
(I'm guessing) a 4X CDROM reader.  He wanted to split up that
hard disk between WinXP and Fedora, and had used Partition Magic
to make two 5GB partitions for Fedora.  He was upset that Fedora
would only install a minimal text-only system. 

I had other people to help (including a fellow who drove up
from Salem at my invitation) so I did not figure out why.  I was
trying to steer him towards Damned Small Linux but he was having
none of it.

According to the Fedora website, the minimum install requirements
for Fedora in RAM is 256MB for text and 384MB for graphics, with
512MB recommended.  A complete set of packages could occupy as
much as 9GB of hard disk.  I knew that 200MB was too little, but
I was unaware that Fedora would automagically install text-only
in these circumstances, and refuse to install graphically when
the space was not available.  So I could not get the fellow to
the "look, this doesn't work, you need more RAM or a leaner 
distro" realization.

One of the harder tasks at the clinic is convincing people that
their older hardware won't run newer distros.  Yes, there is 
ten tons of free candy in that big pile, but you are not going
to carry it all home in your little red wagon. 

It would be good to have a discussion of the latest supported
distros and applications for older and smaller machines.  As
M$ turns a cold shoulder to folks with older hardware, we
have an opportunity to gather lots of refugees.  Conversely,
for many devices (pocket computers) the emphasis is moderate
capability consuming miniscule power.  Those can also benefit
from the leaner distros.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs