----- Original Message ----- From: "Per Jessen" <per@opensuse.org> To: <opensuse@opensuse.org> Sent: Friday, October 31, 2008 5:10 AM Subject: [opensuse] Re: running open/suse on ancient hardware (was: ranting and raving about dependancies.) Larry Stotler wrote:
And if you don't want bigger and better, then why doesn't that apply to software? Run opensuse 10, 9, or 8 if 11 doesn't work on some old hardware.
I do actually. I have SuSE 8.1 on an old Thinkpad that only takes 96MB RAM.
I can beat that with my firewall, a 486DX2 running SUSE 7.1 in just 24Mb RAM. The machine is about 16 years old, and has gone through three harddisks by now. I'm about to replace the whole thing because I want to do traffic-shaping, but otherwise I would probably start using a compact flash disk instead. ----- Wellll... if we wanna talk old or minimal linux... Without sort of cheating and talking about current embedded stuff. This is still basically a pretty modern linux, I mean, it was late 2.0 kernel. But still... One time the regular UPS guy that came to place I worked every day spotted two old GRiD laptops on someones trash pile and brought them to me while on his route. 386sx-16 , 2M ram, some tiny hd space like 20M. mono vga lcd. (approximately like a calculator screen with a little better contrast and brightness, except 640x480 pixels, perhaps not even 256 shades of grey) I robbed the ram from one to make the other 4M The mb had no provision for clearing the bios password but the chip was removable and I was able to clear the bios by popping it into a different board just to use it's cmos-clear jumper with power applied. And using only a tomsrtbt floppy I got the original win3.1 partition resized without destroying and got a lilo based dual boot and tomsrtbt installed on an hd partition. Made a plip cable and had plip networking to a redhat pc. Then I found a 486slc upgrade chip that fit in the 386sx qfp socket and it never ran for more than a few minutes again :/ This was around '98 and I think the laptop was from the late 80's. I'd love a new machine packed into that grid case. The way the screen unfolded with a sort of brace in the middle so it was held in place by a sort of pyramidal geometry like an easel was bulletproof. I completely beleive the stories about them being dropped down cement fire escape stairs while open and running and suffering only paint damage at the corners. -- Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org