Distro for low-spec machine

General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>
>> Personally I think he might be a windoze troll but what the hell .
>> maybe he IS stuck in some benighted third world country with a 386
>> and 1 mb of RAM and no hope of getting anything better.
>
> Was it possible to run Windows 3.1 in 1M? I've never been a Windows
> user so I don't remember what it's minimum requirements were, you
> sure as hell aren't going to run Vista in 1M.

You probably don't want to ever run Vista. See the links in my
sig.

Please don't strip attributions for material you quote.

--




cbfalconer at maineline dot net



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Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com

throw it in the skip.

s. keeling wrote:

>Guy Macon wrote:
>
>>John Hasler wrote:
>>
>>>Guy Macon writes:
>>>
>>>>John Hasler wrote:
>>>
>>>I did not write that.
>>
>>Please accept my apologies for making the above attribution error.
>
>No problem.

I would have thought that the person who I wrongly attributed -- and
who I apologized to -- would be the one who decides whether my error
was "No problem."

>> This is not an excuse, but you can make such errors less likely
>> by not quoting people without the "Person X wrote" attribution line.
>> If you look at your post <87wsyludvc.fsf@toncho.dhh.gt.org> that I
>> replied to, you will see what I mean. Nonetheless, I should have
>> caught my error by counting the ">" characters. Sorry about that.
>
>In my experience, Hasler does not make errors, certainly not the
>boneheaded ones you accuse him of.

I wouldn't characterize them as being boneheaded. "Minor" and
"inconsequential" come to mind. That being said, he did indeed
make those errors. See entire posts quoted at the end of this
post.

I also don't perceive John Hasler to be the sort of person who
objects to a discussion about errors he may have made. Like
most people with a high degree of technical skills, he appears
to welcome such discussions. If I am wrong, I would expect him
to calmly point my error out so that I might learn. If I am
right, I would expect him to thank me for bringing it to his
attention. And if it's just a difference of opinion about how
to quote, I would expect to learn something new from looking
at his reasons for doing it that way.

>You're certainly not qualifified to teach him anything about
>whatever you're accusing him of.

Interesting claim. You know what my qualifications are -- how?

BTW, the word is "qualified", not "qualifified." It appears
that you are not immune to making trivial errors either.

Nor am I.

>> BTW, in a classic example akin to "posts with spelling
>> corrections always contain spelling errors" effect,
>> you messed up the attributions
>
>Hasler does not mess up attributions, in my experience.

Did you just decide to make that claim without examining the
referenced article, or are you unable to detect mistakes that
both John Hasler (see his response to you) and I can clearly see?

>> I see from your headers that you are reading and replying to
>> newsgroups with Emacs. I believe that Emacs can be configured
>> to handle Usenet quoting properly (can anyone else shed any light
>> on this?), so I advise that you either check your configuration
>> or be very careful to proofread all your posts for attribution
>> and quoting errors.
>
>Physician, heal thyself. Hasler's one of the gawds.

I never said that he wasn't.

>You need to learn some humility.

*You* need to learn that highly capable people like John Hasler
don't, as a rule, get their panties in a wad about a simple
discussion about Usenet quoting styles. They also tend to be
quite capable of fighting their own fights without you jumping
in and "defending" them.

>Google groups.google.com for "site:lists.debian.net hasler" for
>a much needed education. Ignorance is excused. Willful stupidity
>tends to be ignored.

I don't need to be informed about John Hasler's considerable
contributions to the Linux community. Your error is in assuming
that something about being "one of the gawds" makes one immune
to making trivial errors or unwilling to be corrected on same.

I might be considered "one of the gawds" in my own rather narrow
field; more consumers have bought products that I designed than
those of anyone here or in the engineering groups I post to.
Does that mean that you shouldn't point out my errors? Of course
not.



I will now quote the two posts with the small quoting errors in
full. Please note that this is in response to Keeling's assertion
that I was wrong. The reader should not put an undue emphasis on
what were minor errors based on the following.

Post one: Note missing "Shadow_7
wrote:" attribution, making it difficult to determine who
wrote the line starting with "You'd be hard pressed...?"

For extra credit, check author's other recent posts and note
that most of them do not have this or any other any quoting or
attribution errors; this was simply a minor human error like
we all make from time to time.

**** START OF QUOTE ONE ****

Path: ...!extra.newsguy.com!newsp.newsguy.com!toncho.dhh.gt.org!news
From: John Hasler
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Distro for low-spec machine
Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2007 12:49:59 -0500
Organization: Dancing Horse Hill
Lines: 17
Message-ID: <87wsyludvc.fsf@toncho.dhh.gt.org>
References:

NNTP-Posting-Host:
p5c7c94bfff000000a9d5b287fb5aa4a87988d91adc675db9.newsdawg.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.99 (gnu/linux)
Cancel-Lock: sha1:e5lwyfOMbctS0nb6b1GvrpJIhc4=
Xref: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.os.linux.misc:670579


> I run debian on my router, and I have about 1GB of stuff installed on it.
> To include compilers and the -devs needed to compile a custom kernel.
> The kernel alone if 400MB-ish once compiled.

That's the kernel source tree. There is no need to compile the kernel on
the router.

> You'd be hard pressed to make a router on only 40MB's of space. It
> probably could be done, but you should be looking at distro's geared for
> PDAs, not desktops.

It isn't that hard.
--
John Hasler
john@dhh.gt.org
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI USA

**** END OF QUOTE ONE ****



Post two: Note doubled "Guy Macon writes:" and "John Hasler wrote:"
attributions and the missing ">". Again, note that most of the
author's other recent posts do not have this or any other errors.

**** START OF QUOTE TWO ****

Path: ...!extra.newsguy.com!newsp.newsguy.com!toncho.dhh.gt.org!news
From: John Hasler
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Distro for low-spec machine
Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2007 19:55:38 -0500
Organization: Dancing Horse Hill
Lines: 12
Message-ID: <87hcpov8qd.fsf@toncho.dhh.gt.org>
References:

<87wsyludvc.fsf@toncho.dhh.gt.org>

NNTP-Posting-Host:
p24d1bfbfff000000b08c4b9d8858aca651708709c247dd7f.newsdawg.com
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
User-Agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.99 (gnu/linux)
Cancel-Lock: sha1:03opVIaS1VlKrbKDrhRtKNYj9qQ=
Xref: number1.nntp.dca.giganews.com comp.os.linux.misc:670616


Guy Macon writes:
John Hasler wrote:

>> You'd be hard pressed to make a router on only 40MB's of space.

I did not write that.

--
John Hasler
john@dhh.gt.org
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI USA

**** END OF QUOTE TWO ****

Can we talk about Linux now? Please?

On Sun, 03 Jun 2007, in the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.linux.misc, in article
, Jules wrote:

>On Sun, 03 Jun 2007 11:08:48 -0700, navti wrote:
>> "Released in 1990, Microsoft Windows 3.0 was a revolutionary operating
>> system for the PC as one of the most used GUI operating systems."
>
>Where'd you get that from? It was DOS with a graphical shell on top as I
>remember, not an OS in its own right :-)

I think that's straight out of the "Getting Started with Microsoft Windows"
"manual". win3.1 was so full of applications - you had file manager, and
_two_ games!!! What more could you need?

For more dates:

1985 Microsoft Windows 1.0 is introduced in November, 1985 and is
initially sold for $100.00.
1987 Microsoft Windows 2.0 was released December 9, 1987 and is initially
sold for $100.00.
1987 Microsoft Windows/386 or Windows 386 is introduced December 9, 1987
and is initially sold for $100.00.
1988 Microsoft Windows/286 or Windows 286 is introduced June, 1988 and is
initially sold for $100.00.
1990 Microsoft Windows 3.0 was released May, 22 1990. Microsoft Windows
3.0 full version was priced at $149.95 and the upgrade version was
priced at $79.95.
1991 Microsoft Windows 3.0 or Windows 3.0a with multimedia was released
October, 1991.
1992 Microsoft Windows 3.1 was released April, 1992 and sells more than 1
Million copies within the first two months of its release.
1992 Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.1 was released October, 1992.
1993 Microsoft Windows NT 3.1 was released August, 1993.

>> System requirements: 286 or later processor. 640K conventional memory
>> (additional 256K extended memory recommended),
>>
>> so 1mb and you were hot to trot.
>
>That's 3.0 though, not 3.1 - wasn't 3.1 386-only, and so quite possibly
>assumed more available memory?


Windows requires:

o Microsoft MS-DOS version 3.1 or later. (To check your version,
type *ver* at the MS-DOS prompt.)

o For /386 enhanced mode/, a personal computer with an 80386 proces-
sor (or higher) and 640 kilobytes (K) of conventional memory plus
1024K of extended memory, 8 megabytes (MB) of free disk space
(10.o is recommended), and at least one floppy disk drive.

o For /standard mode/, a personal computer with an 80286 processor
(or higher_ and 640 K of conventional memory plus 256K of
extended memory, 6.0 MB of free disk space (9 MB recom-
mended), and at least one floppy disk drive



That's from the 1992 "Getting Started" "manual" (the one with the license
inside the front cover, that you could only see by opening the package).
Luckily, Soft Landing Systems had released their first distribution of
Linux (version 0.96p4 in September of 1992), so I had no further reason
to be using microsoft crap-ware.

Old guy

Guy Macon :
> s. keeling wrote:
> >No problem.
>
> I would have thought that the person who I wrongly attributed -- and

Points taken. I must have been half asleep. Consider it retracted,
and please accept my apologies.


--
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
(*) http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling Linux Counter #80292
- - http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html Please, don't Cc: me.
Spammers! http://www.spots.ab.ca/~keeling/emails.html

> Why would you feel a need to compile on a machine intended for a
> dedicated task?

Because you have a network interface that doesn't have a non-source/
binary driver with your distro. And you have no viable way to get the
driver on the machine without using the network driver.

Case in point, doing a net install over dialup through a router with a
win-modem. And the install to be done on the router without another box,
much less a linux one to work with. Granted that having development
tools on the router does pose a security risk.

> And your notions are way off, no way is a kernel going to be 400megs. I
> just checked mine, and it's 1.3megs.

Sorry, I should have said the kernel source tree with compiled binaries.

Shadow_7 wrote:
>> Why would you feel a need to compile on a machine intended for a
>> dedicated task?
>
> Because you have a network interface that doesn't have a non-source/
> binary driver with your distro. And you have no viable way to get the
> driver on the machine without using the network driver.
>
Then how did you get the distro on the machine to start with?

At some level you have to have a way to get code onto a machine, even if
its only burned in PROM...you can slawys use that way to get the net
dricvers on..


> Case in point, doing a net install over dialup through a router with a
> win-modem. And the install to be done on the router without another box,
> much less a linux one to work with. Granted that having development
> tools on the router does pose a security risk.
>

Id say it would be easier to buy a router.

>> And your notions are way off, no way is a kernel going to be 400megs. I
>> just checked mine, and it's 1.3megs.
>
> Sorry, I should have said the kernel source tree with compiled binaries.

I demand that Guy Macon may or may not have written...

[snip]
> Post one: Note missing "Shadow_7 wrote:"
> attribution, making it difficult to determine who wrote the line starting
> with "You'd be hard pressed...?"

Not necessarily true; a threaded display or a way to directly access the
ancestor articles, e.g. a menu whose content is determined from the
References header, makes this quite easy (assuming that the quoting is
otherwise reasonably clear).

[snip]
> Can we talk about Linux now? Please?

Maybe. :-)

--
| Darren Salt | linux or ds at | nr. Ashington, | Toon
| RISC OS, Linux | youmustbejoking,demon,co,uk | Northumberland | Army
| Kill all extremists!

Make input easy to proofread

navti wrote:
>
> throw it in the skip.

Throw what in what, and why? See below.

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