On 03/17/2016 04:18 PM, William Lee Valentine wrote:
I have installed Debian 2.6.32-5-686 on two machines. One, a custom
machine, has a Pentium III processor running at 800 megahertz, and
has 500 megabytes of memory; the other is an IBM Mpro Intellistation
6229 with a Pentium IIII processor running at 2.2 gigahertz, and has
2 gigabytes of memory.
Debian notified me of updates for some time after I had had put it
on those machines. Then it ceased to have anything to say about
updates. I have four questions to ask about maintaining Debian.
(1) Am I to update the kernel periodically? Is there advantage to
doing so?
(2) If I do, will I again receive notices of updates, and will these
reference only the new kernel or the new kernel and also other
programs that I have installed?
(3) If I update the kernel, do I simply download it and install it
over the old one, or is there some process of uninstalling the old
kernel that is needed before a later kernel is put in?
(4) How much disc space, at the minimum, should I allot to Debian, if
I leave it essentially in a single block on the primary disc drive? I
assume that OpenOffice will be installed automatically (since it was
earlier); and I will try to install XAMPP, WordPress, and Drupal.
On 03/17/2016 03:52 PM, Lisi Reisz wrote:
2.6.32-5-686 is a kernel number. Since you call it Debian
2.6.32-5-686 it is presumably a Debian compiled kernel. Which
versionof Debian? This
https://packages.debian.org/squeeze/linux-image-2.6.32-5-686
would suggest that it is Squeeze (Debian 6).
Squeeze has very recently stopped being supported, on 29th of
February 2016, which may be why reminders stopped. What form did the
upgrade reminders take?
Debian 6 is obsolete. You're going to want to do a
backup-wipe-install-restore cycle on both machines and move to Debian 7
(or 8).
The Intellistation should make for an acceptable low-end desktop
machine. I'd recommend:
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/7.9.0/i386/iso-cd/debian-7.9.0-i386-xfce-CD-1.iso
One of my favorite tricks is to use 16 GB USB 3.0 flash drives as system
drives (in machines that can run from a USB drive), partitioned
(manually) as follows:
0.5 GB ext4 /boot
0.5 GB random key encrypted swap
13.4 GB passphrase encrypted btrfs / (root)
Install these software sets:
Debian desktop environment
print server
SSH server
Standard system utilities
You should have ~8 GB free HDD and ~1 GB free RAM when you're done.
XAMPP, WordPress, and Drupal should fit on the system drive, but you
might want to set up a HDD (or RAID) for Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc., data.
As always, you will want enough RAM to avoid swapping.
Getting Debian 7+ on the Pentium III could be tough -- the BIOS probably
won't boot the Debian installer on USB, and might not boot the Debian
installer on CD. If the easy approaches fail, there are other
approaches that require more work. If/ when you get the Debian
installer going, install to a HDD, don't use encryption, and only install:
SSH server
Standard system utilities
You can add things carefully after that, but 512 MB of RAM, USB 1.1, IDE
HDD's, etc., will be limiting. That said, if you have some spare
network card(s) and the machine supports them, it would make a decent
firewall.
David
