[Cialug] [cialug]small linux

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Nathan C. Smith wrote:
> I can't believe I am suggesting it, but Gentoo is supposed to be able
>  to run on older hardware. (shiver)
> 
> You can even recompile the whole distribution to match your hardware.
>  ;-) May take a week or longer on a p75 though.

   The trick here is to do the bootstrap/initial package installs on a
faster machine.  There is a really detailed section of the install
manual that walks through the steps involved.

   Updates can be handled by generating binary install packages on the
faster machine or even just setting the slower machine up in such a way
that a periodic re-imaging is minimally painful.

   You could always use LFS if Gentoo isn't cool enough for ya. ;)

   Now having said all that, it's a lot of work to go through
(essentially rolling your own one-off distribution) just to be able to
resurrect an old p75 from the dumpster.

   As far as installing/running X...  Ugh.  It was painful when that
machine was brand new.  It'd definately be a "nostalgic" experience today...

   If you want to explore this a little bit more without spending a whole
lot of extra time, Knoppix claims to support i486 systems with as little
as 20MB of ram (92MB for basic X and 128 for Office programs).  You can
use a boot disk if the CDROM drive is not bootable.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix-info/index-en.html

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