[Coco] OT: Which Linux Distro?

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Jim Hickle may have mentioned these words:


>Bob Devries <devries.bob at gmail.com> wrote: Gentlemen,
>I have a Compaq Armada 1500c Laptop
>.
>It has 64MB RAM, and a ~366MHz Celeron processor and 12GB hard disk and a
>CDROM drive. I also use a Belkin Wireless Network (802.11g) card in it. It
>is model #FSD7010.
>
>Which Linux Distro would be best to use? I know about DSL (Damn Small
>Linux), but are there others which will install and run in such a small
>footprint?

Try Slackware. The install *still* warns that "If you have less than 16M of 
RAM, you might need to turn on swapfile access to complete the install." ;-)

It's also the only "fullblown" distro that can successfully be installed 
without X windows whatsoever, from my experience.

There's a Ubuntu "server" edition that comes without X, but it installs 
many server apps and might not run as well in 64M... It's a decent distro 
for a server - but I've never tried to "trim it down."

On the other end of the spectrum is "Linux From Scratch" -- it's very small 
because it's all HTML. It's a book that you read, that gives you all of the 
commands necessary to completely compile your own Linux... you guessed 
it... from scratch. On your machine, it'll take about 4 days to build the 
ever-so-basic core of Linux, and prolly another 4 days for enough utils to 
get anything beyond basic work done (6 if you want SQL databases like 
PostgreSQL & MySQL, 9 or 10 if you want X as well) but on my laptop (a 
933Mhz Crusoe critter) it was the fastest Linux I could find. Booted up 
with Apache, PostgreSQL, ColdFusion, X, FTP server software took just under 
80Meg RAM (fits *nicely* in 512Meg - never needed swap) - Booting to the 
CLI without Apache or Databases was under 30Meg.

Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger

--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | "Bugs of a feather flock together."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers |           Russell Nelson
zmerch at 30below.com          |