On Wed, 8 Apr 1998, Chris Frost wrote:
> in this classroom are a bunch of assorted 386's, w/ mostly 4mb's of ram, a
> 40 to couple hundred meg hd, etc. Can I install linux on these? I wouldn't
Barely. This might be a little bit underpowered, though. If there is a
network, you can put them all on the network and mount all but the /
directory over NFS (/usr, /home, and so on, basically all but /etc, /var,
and /tmp). That will save you gobs of trouble. The real problem is that
with only 4MB of RAM you need a lot of swap to do any compiling, and with
only a 40MB drive, you don't HAVE a lot of swap. If you don't have a
network, you probably just can't do this in any meaningful way. It could
be made to WORK but the hassles for both the administrator and the end
user would probably not be worth it. Turn off "expensive" daemons like
sendmail, and inetd too (which isn't expensive itself, but tends to spawn
expensive daemons) unless you need it for telnet, FTP, etc. Use an old
version of Red Hat (4.2, or maybe even 3.0.3) since the newer libraries
take up a lot more RAM. (I am assuming that your primary concern here is
not security).
> need anything like x, just something like vi (emacs would take too much
> ram), and the c++ stuff (guess I'd have to compile kernels on my home
The "joe" editor is very memory efficient and would probably work nicely
in 4MB of RAM. It is very full featured and has Wordstar and Emacs
command sets. If you subject anyone to vi, those with the ability to will
jump ship and the rest will hate you. But no matter how hard you try, the
"friendliness" of the development environment you can stuff into a 4MB 386
is just going to be not there for you.
> machine, I doubt they have enough hard drive to do it).
Probably not. :) Fortunately, one kernel will probabably do for all these
systems, if they are reasonably similar; and if they aren't, then you can
still use modules and keep the kernel compiling to a minimum.
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