[ILUG] Re: what do u think?

[Caolan McNamara]

On 15-Oct-99 John P . Looney wrote:
>On Fri, Oct 15, 1999 at 05:28:57AM -0500, John_White at dell.com mentioned:
>> <don't remember who the original poster was>
>> 
>> I have an old slackware  distribution (kernel 1.1.59) that ran quite well on
>> an AMD 386sx40 with 4MB ram. It was a little slow booting, but once up was
>> quite happy (I never tried X on it though). If you want a copy, mail me.
>
> Point to note: I did have a friend that was running Slackware with a 1.2.3
>kernel on a 486DX2. Tryed to compile a kernel, while in X.
>
> After eight hours, it burned out the swap partition of the hard disk. As
>in, he needed to replace the drive, as any accesses to that partition
>started stalling/hanging the disk!

On the other hand I had a very similiar setup and compiled a kernel without 
problems (though it did take all weekend). True enough my usual compile cycle
for an an X app I was writing was to shup down X, compile and restart X :-), 
and I spent quite a while breaking all my c files into very small units so
that making changes would require only the minimum of recompiling Any new 
functions had to be added to the top of c files, so that syntax errors would be 
found in the new code before parsing the older working functions, ludicrous 
stuff and not fun at all. 100 meg partition, space saving stuff included 
stripping all the binaries, removing all the documentation, hacking out openwin
and just about every utility and app that I didn't need. The no of runnning apps
and daemons was winnowed down to about 7 or 8, mostly getty's and bdflush. The
footprint of a shell is just shocking though. I never did get ash or any of 
those tiny shells, should have I suppose.

C.
 
Real Life: Caolan McNamara           *  Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara at ul.ie          *  Phone: +353-86-8790257
URL: http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan    *  Sig: an oblique strategy
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