Gowator Posted May 26, 2004 Report Share Posted May 26, 2004 Yep its the INSTALL thats the killer with ISOlinux... and low memory becuase the whole lot has to be loaded with no swap,. It was running Deb SID quite happily with 64MB... even KDE was 'usable' at a stretch :D tho flux was much smoother. In the end mem usage can be best controlled by compiling your own kernel. Also some dynamic modules like the NVIDIA driver have huge foot prints... I dont mind it on a 1GB RAM system but with 32MB ?? Choose the absolute bear minimum modules and compile them into the kernel and you end up with a much smaller foot print. remember bzimages used to fit on floppies (uncompressed) since memory got so cheap linux has exploited it. I just realised though.... I have the PERFECT DISTRO.... Beos5. (it will probably be lost with a full 32MB to play with)... Its truly tiny! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeanrev Posted May 26, 2004 Author Report Share Posted May 26, 2004 the type of memory in the PC concerned is no more available of course and this old PC has no DVD reader if I can copy the necessary part of this DVD on my HD and then burn a CD with it ... but of course I cannot propose such a solution to a new comer to Linux so no known equivalent of WIN98SE in the multitude of Linux distributions ? the newbie must buy a new PC ! thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jeanrev Posted May 26, 2004 Author Report Share Posted May 26, 2004 Roland is right... the only real difference now is memory usage. Linux LOVES memory. My 1GB machine at home uses ALL 1GB becuase the unused is used to cache the disk. Some version of mansdrake started the isolinix install. the criteria of using this is I think 64MB RAM becuase it loads into memory FIRST. It doesnt use the disk becuase it still doesnt know if it will be over writing the disk or not. I understand you just want email and internet ??? Is that correct.... An alternative is a Debian Woody install. (very stable) with the minimum. You are comparing only cvertain features of the OS which are important to YOU.... thats OK but its not a whole story. 8.2 has apache/mail servers etc. if you choose em. One area for linux which would be very interesting is a distro exactly for your needs. Even just an internet browsing box for minimal machines. It doesnt need X so long as its got a frame buffer browser and shows graphics.... When you install make sure its minimal.... Remember Win98 was written in 98 and even the ME 4 yrs ago when mem was much more expensive. Now the cost of your machine is not calcualtable..... Its a shame becuase many 3rd world countries could benefit but the problem is the price of parts when you can walk into a shop and buy a whole new 2Ghz+ machine for <400 euro... I ended up buying my Dad a XP machine for XMAS because his old 98 machine had spyware, bugs and allsorts... It just wasnt worth the hassle .... This old machine was similar to yours except it had 64MB RAM,... I ran a debian on in it and now its a router/firewall/web/mail server. yes it is correct Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gowator Posted May 26, 2004 Report Share Posted May 26, 2004 the type of memory in the PC concerned is no more available of course and this old PC has no DVD reader if I can copy the necessary part of this DVD on my HD and then burn a CD with it ... but of course I cannot propose such a solution to a new comer to Linux so no known equivalent of WIN98SE in the multitude of Linux distributions ? the newbie must buy a new PC ! thanks It just happens that MY copy of 8.2 is a DVD copy. My copies of 8.0 and 8.1 are CD.... Ive got masses of REALLY old distros that should run but it depends WHAT you want to compare to Win98. A distro is far more than a Os, its lots of ancillary programs too. If you want to use word2000 on the win98 PC it wont run in 32MB! OfficeXP is even more demanding. Heres my Winb task manager RIGHT NOW.... IEXPLORE.EXE 38,184k nlnotes 23,272k WINWORD.EXE 16,120k EXCEL.EXE 10,476k even wordpad is 6,644k In other words NONE of this would run on your win98 box.... What has changed is memory availablility. I remember getitng a 1MB graphics card for a ridiculous sum.... and a promise DC4030VL disk controller that took SIMMS and I actually had 8MB in it and 32MB memory. Word and Excel ran great! (word 2 and excel 5) Basically IE, word and excel still do the same now they did then! But you can no longer BUY word2 or Excel 5 even though they were perfectly good! Back in 1998 Mandrake was writing for lower requirements, like everyone else including MS. Linux can and still will run on an old 486 and can still do usefull things like being a router etc. I have a P100 running RH7 and working as a router for 2 years and its only been rebooted once for power failure! However you can't expect to take a modern distro and run it on a older machine efficiently. the install thing is a pain.... really... but isolinux actually made the install process MUCH easier for the end user. The downside was they needed more RAM. Win98 needs X reboots to install..... MDK or any other linux just one. knoppix, pclinuxos runs without ANY.... You still havent said EXACTLY what you want it to do? How would you like it to compete with Windows... if its running write or wordpad then it won't becuase these are windows progs... if you prefer solitaire with the same cards as win98 ... then same problem. anyway... this MIGHT be what your looking for ?? Peanut lite Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted May 26, 2004 Report Share Posted May 26, 2004 SlackwareDebian :unsure: well you said "safe" and these install on older machines. and yes, newbies install them al the time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DragonMage Posted May 26, 2004 Report Share Posted May 26, 2004 Heh.. there was a time when slackware was the distro for newbies... :) Anyway, as long as you are comfortable with command line when installing / configuring stuffs, slackware is not that bad a distro. In fact, it was my friend's (a relatively linux newbie compared to some of us, about 1 year of linux use) favorite distro. I just don't like slackware because of a bad blood between us. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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