On Sun, May 09, 1999 at 04:50:30PM -0700, George Bonser wrote:
Hi George!
> Well I got the old 386 put back together, figured I would use it for a
> firewall. 386SX33 with 10MB of RAM. Man, what an example to show what OS
> bloat has done! I used to install Win31 on it, even installed OS/2 Warp
> on it. Now it is running Debian and MAN is it S-L-O-W.
> In dselect the Scanning available packages .......... part puts out about
> one dot every three seconds.
> It will probably take overnight to install from CDROM. I thought Linux
> was supposed to be snappy on old hardware? Or at LEAST as fast as Windows.
> The kernel seems fast enough but the distro-specific stuff is pretty
> doggy.
Once the system is installed, it does perform sufficiently well
(talking of an AMD386 DX40 w/ 16MB , though), IMHO, but the install
is a pain nevertheless. It was clocked 7.94 BogoMips, BTW.
Besides the OS' you mentioned above, did you bother trying to install
FreeBSD on it?
I had it installed on said machine and ran several (maybe somewhere near a
dozen) port compiles at once, totalling ~200 make/cc processes, at load of
about 20-25 and worth 80MB of swap.
All these processes were run at a low priority and one could still work
with the machine without to much delay. This had me really impressed.
--
thomas. .powered.by.debian/linux.
irc.:.#chatgate, #frust.ger
