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| Author |
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| 25 new of 203 responses total. |
cross
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response 172 of 203:
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Feb 19 02:12 UTC 2007 |
Oh yes; don't worry, my hair is better than The Donald's comb-over.
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keesan
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response 173 of 203:
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Feb 19 03:40 UTC 2007 |
Re 165 (?) from maus Are you offering to put together some small linux that
I can transfer via some external drive (I have a USB external drive and a 1GB
USB flash drive) that will run Opera and also WORD under WINE? That fits in
500MB? This particular computer has 2 PCI slots and I put a video card into
one of them (rather than dealing with an odd driver that I might have to
compile). No network card. Eventually an external modem. I was told not
to put any more work into it right now. It was supposed to be for the
to-be-ex-wife of a friend and we will see if she even wants to use the linux
part of it for the internet. He says she is rarely satisfied with anything
he gives her. He is delighted with the linux/opera I put on his computer.
By great good fortune he already has a Lucent modem in there which worked with
ltmodem.o driver. My two lucent modems did not.
If she does not like linux, I will let him put Win98 and WORD on the drive
after removing linux and enlarging the Win98 partition.
I installed Slackware 10.1 or 10.2 on one computer and it immediately filled
up at least 1GB in a minimal installation, and wasted 64MB of RAM on running
unneeded daemons. It had several pages of config file for X. I am using
a generic Xvesa driver with no config file.
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cross
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response 174 of 203:
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Feb 19 03:45 UTC 2007 |
(Her not being satisfied with things he gives her might have more to do with
the fact that she is a soon-to-be-ex-wife than that she is not satisfied with
those things. And perhaps, vice versa.)
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keesan
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response 175 of 203:
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Feb 19 16:04 UTC 2007 |
Vice versa. Today someone brought us 9 64MB and 4 128MB SIMMs so we could
actually put together computers with 128MB RAM and Ubuntu (if we had lots of
large hard disks - it demands 2GB) but Ubuntu is slower. He also brought four
SIMMS (two labelled 64MB) that have two little slots very close to each other
just off of center, with no chips on two (just greenboard) and some metal
cased thing on the other two. ??? And a no-name motherboard with onboard
i810 video sound and only three slots to replace them with. No ISA and we
are out of extra external modems. Anyone have 28.8K or 33.6K they don't want?
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maus
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response 176 of 203:
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Feb 19 19:32 UTC 2007 |
I will look into creating an image for this. In my past experience, the
basic load of Slackware was pretty small and light. If it has grown over
the years, you would be better off using a decently sized drive to
accomodate a reasonable distribution of Linux.
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keesan
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response 177 of 203:
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Feb 19 20:13 UTC 2007 |
I am putting linux on the hardware that we have and do not want a distribution
of linux, just enough files to dial and run Opera. The standard Slackware
puts on all sorts of unwanted things. Wait on this project to see if the
person getting the latest computer really wants linux. Why an image file
rather than a .tgz? What kernel does the Slackware 11 glibc require? The
glibc from Slackware 9.1 insisted on a kernel 2.4, which I have compiled.
A lot of the reason why the later kernels are larger is they support newer
hardware, and I am using Slackware 4 or earlier age hardware.
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cross
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response 178 of 203:
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Feb 19 20:27 UTC 2007 |
The Linux pundits will tell you until they are blue in the face that the
kernel is actually very small and that all the support for newer hardware is
done via kernel modules; so supporting older systems in a small amount of
space is trivial: just delete the modules you don't need.
The reason you may want to do this is because giving someone Windows 98 and
Office 98 is illegal.
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jep
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response 179 of 203:
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Feb 19 21:27 UTC 2007 |
Dan: I refer to people by loginid because it is unique. There are other
people here called "Dan" but no others called "cross".
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cross
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response 180 of 203:
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Feb 19 21:32 UTC 2007 |
That's fine, I guess.
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keesan
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response 181 of 203:
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Feb 20 00:07 UTC 2007 |
The kernel that comes with my linux is about 400K. The standard Slackware
2.2.16 kernel is about 1GB. How big is 2.6?
The person getting the latest computer has their own OEM copies of 98 and
OFFICE.
The later libraries are a lot bigger.
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mcnally
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response 182 of 203:
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Feb 20 02:00 UTC 2007 |
re #181: surely you mean 1MB, and not 1GB.
on my Ubuntu laptop, my untrimmed kernel is about 1.2MB.
mcnally@skookum:~$ ls -l /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1207281 2007-02-06 20:04 /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.12-10-386
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keesan
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response 183 of 203:
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Feb 20 03:50 UTC 2007 |
1MB, of course. Is 2.6 less buggy than 2.4?
My custom kernel, with modular support for sound, framebuffer, usb, and scsi,
is 700K (2.4.31). The generic kernel that came with my linux is 430K.
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mcnally
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response 184 of 203:
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Feb 20 06:47 UTC 2007 |
> Is 2.6 less buggy than 2.4?
I have no idea how to answer that. Which version of 2.4?
Which version of 2.6? Which bugs?
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keesan
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response 185 of 203:
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Feb 20 15:45 UTC 2007 |
2.4.31, latest 2.6. 2.4.31 has a few problems. Can't load usb_serial as a
module (has to be built-in). Have to load gameport.o for some sound cards
to work even though it is not listed in modules.dep. Why are you using 2.6?
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maus
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response 186 of 203:
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Feb 20 16:01 UTC 2007 |
2.6 is what most distributions ship with. Besides working better with
desktop-type hardware, it allows device-name persistence for
hot-pluggable devices, hot-plug capabilities for PCI boards (PCI, PCI-X
and Compact PCI) which allows live repairs and newer ones offer
kdump/kexec functionality. Aside from that, it is actively developed and
*supported* by Linux distributors. There are a few problems, to be sure;
namely, the OOM-killer behaves badly and can cut off access to the box
entirely (bigger problem on overloaded servers) and the memory
oversubscription is a little flaky, leading to the OOM-Killer being
called. Both of these are tunable parameters, though, and
oversubscription can be turned off and OOM-killer can be made more sane
or shut off entirely. Additionally, the t3 driver (Tigon gigabit
ethernet driver) is fucking nuts and can cause stability problems in
kernel-space (I have seen one box freak out multiple times in a day when
under heavy network load using a NIC that is run by the t3 driver --
customer was very *NOT HAPPY* and we wound up disabling the t3 NIC and
adding an Intel PRO/1000 NIC board and all was happy).
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maus
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response 187 of 203:
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Feb 20 16:02 UTC 2007 |
Wow, I probably should have broken that into a couple of paragraphs.
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keesan
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response 188 of 203:
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Feb 20 18:03 UTC 2007 |
I don't even know what OOM is and have no need for hotplugging. Had to use
kernel 2.4 for USB-storage (but DOS also supports that except for my SM card
reader). I probably would not take advantage of any features of 2.6 on my
1998-2001 hardware. Am giving people 2.2.26 and also optionally 2.4.31 on
computers with USB ports (two so far). 2.4 correctly identifies the amount
of memory even in computers with i810 video, where I have to subtract 1MB from
onboard memory with mem= to make 2.2 kernels boot. If I knew a whole lot more
I could try to write my own kernel without things I don't use. Some of our
computers have 12MB RAM so a smaller kernel is better.
I still can't get ssh working as 'user'.
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maus
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response 189 of 203:
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Feb 20 18:10 UTC 2007 |
Hot-plugging is useful for external devices, such as USB, Serial and
Firewire devices.
OOM means out-of-memory. The Linux kernel oversubscribes memory, and if
it runs out of total virtual memory (RAM + swap), it runs a daemon in
kernel space that forcibly kills processes and forcibly free()s their
memory so that the kernel will not panic. In some cases, it can behave
pathologically, but in many cases can keep the system up through a
transient memory shortages. On memory-constrained systems, a
well-behaved way of coping with OOM conditions is critical, and if the
kernel requests more memory and can't get it, it can panic or worse.
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keesan
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response 190 of 203:
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Feb 20 22:58 UTC 2007 |
I don't run out of memory. We are giving everyone at least 64MB which is
plenty for running one browser. But I have had the problem on computers with
8MB or less RAM and no swap space - it just crashes.
USB storage works fine if you just load the drivers manually. Same for serial
devices.
Thanks for the explanations. I have never managed to use even 128MB RAM at
one time, as a single user.
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maus
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response 191 of 203:
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Feb 22 05:10 UTC 2007 |
Keesan, I regularly see boxes with 2 GBytes of RAM and 4 GBytes of swap
start shooting processes to free memory (and I usually get a ticket when
the OOM-killer shoots sshd or httpd). Real systems with real loads and
thousands of users accessing simultaneously a web application that talks
to a database require more RAM.
Manually loading drivers is an unacceptable inconvenience for many
users, and imposes a barrier to use. For most people, the operating
environment is simply a vehicle to use the commands that they need; most
people do not get off on faffing around with their operating environment
to achieve things that have been solved elegantly and reasonably.
P.S: My partner, who is sick and on medications responds "wake up and
come into the 1990s".
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keesan
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response 192 of 203:
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Feb 22 16:15 UTC 2007 |
The computers we put together are for single users and don't run out of
memory. The one person who requested USB was really interested in learning
linux and had no objection to typing usb-on and mount /dev/sda1 /mnt.
And he was delighted with the 15 second boot. So while 2.6 may be much better
for your situation, 2.2 (2.4 if you need USB storage) works fine for mine.
Most of our computers and libc5 are from the late 90s already. A 1999 linux
runs faster on a 1998 computer than the latest and greatest.
To use the internet on the latest computer I set up, boot the computer,
type lin to boot from DOS to linux (or win for Windows instead), root
and Enter to login as root, dial to dial as root, login user and Enter to
login as user and automatically load X, then you can select programs from
the START menu with a mouse (or type their names in an rxvt). Type reboot
to reboot before shutting off the computer. I put little menus with
instructions along the way (in autoexec.bat and issue). How is this not
elegant?
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fudge
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response 193 of 203:
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Feb 27 12:07 UTC 2007 |
this just gave me the idea of removing the gear stick from my car, after all
in town I hardly get to use anything other than the second gear, which with
a little getting used to you can also start moving with. that way the car will
be lighter and I'll have more space to move! less consumption and more
comfort! ;P
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nharmon
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response 194 of 203:
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Feb 27 13:04 UTC 2007 |
While you're at it, remove all of the seats and only install the ones
you need, adding and removing them as needed. And a car from 1982 drives
the same as one from 2004, so there is no point to buying anything newer
than 15 years old. Oh, and fuel injection annoys me, so anything I get
has to be carburated. If you ever need an oil change, Jim might be able
to help. He'll jack up the car, remove the drain plug, refill it with
oil, and let you drive off forgetting to reinstall the drain plug. When
your car dies, you can just pick up another junker from us for $50.
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keesan
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response 195 of 203:
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Feb 27 19:49 UTC 2007 |
Good idea. Better yet, use a bike in town. Takes up much less space, makes
almost no noise or pollution, and is better for everyone's health.
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tod
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response 196 of 203:
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Feb 27 21:13 UTC 2007 |
And if you get hungry, eat some dried leaves and twigs and drink water from
the curb.
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