Re: XLEL: Best Dist?

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 09:46:23PM -0600, Scott C. Linnenbringer wrote:
> I use Debian, but it offers way too much for a small 486.

It offers a lot, but I think it can still be installed nicely on a
smaller disk and run in a relatively small amount of RAM.  And then
you still get the nice package management tools...  (Sure, apt-get
will take a while to run, but it will still work.  :-)

> Slackware's package management system is very similar to ports. In fact, 
> Slackware uses BSD-style init scripts and other similarities which make it a 
> very viable option for a low end machine.

BSD init scripts just make a system unmanageable.  They don't have
much impact on system performance.

Keep in mind that the box in question was fairly high-end when Red Hat
was first getting really popular, and it had SysV init scripts back
then too.  :-)  (Granted, Red Hat seems to go out of their way to make
their scripts as complicated as possible, which probably slows down
boot a little, but I'm pretty sure Debian doesn't suffer from that
particular problem.)

I'm going to try very hard to avoid my anti-Slackware rant tonight.  I
should be doing real work anyway.  ;-)

> XFCE is neato, but even that is too high-end for a 486SX, in my humble 
> opinion. Maybe fluxbox or blackbox, or, uh, good old twm.

Geez, I used to run fvwm on a 386 with less memory, and it ran really,
really well.  Hell, I ran mwm on that box too, I think.  (I did have
an FPU though...  I seem to recall that helped a lot with font
rendering.  Running a font server, like every modern distro does,
solves most of that problem though.)

Anyway, I'd be really surprised if you couldn't at least run
WindowMaker pretty well on a 486 still.  Dropping down to twm would
just be painful.  The only real issue I can see is with color depth,
but surely whoever has this box could dig a 1MB ISA or a 2-4MB PCI
card out of the trash if it becomes a problem.

> Don't even entertain the thought of putting Red Hat on a 486SX.

If it were a 486DX, I can't see any reason 7.3 wouldn't install
(eventually).  8.0 might too, but certainly not from the GUI installer
(which you need to do LVM).  I found this out the hard way trying to
do an install on an old Pentium.  At 32MB, the install would crash
every time because they don't enable swap soon enough.  On 64MB, it
survived long enough to turn on swap.

I'm pretty sure Red Hat hasn't bothered including FPU emulation in
their kernels for a long time, but I could be wrong about that...

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux Users Group
(618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting details.
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/

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