[Rule] fc5 testing report

Kargiotakis George kargig at noc.uoi.gr
Fri Apr 14 04:23:04 EEST 2006 

Hello all,

first of all I would like to congratulate you all on this great project. Mr
Kweskin was the one who introduced it to me.

Mr Kweskin started installing fedora core 5 on an old laptop of mine. Laptop
basic specs are as follows:

model name      : AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
cpu MHz         : 328.034
Total Ram: 64Mb
Neomagic Video Card
4Gb HD

The install.log is also attached.

The installation was a bit painfull in order to get the right packages in. First
of all we had a serious problem about the recognition of pcmcia devices. If I
remember correctly the pcmciautils-011-1.2 package was missing and no pcmcia
devices could work. Drivers were loaded as modules perfectly but no devices
were created in /dev without this package.

When that was fixed and we could finally update/install packages from the
network, we started installing some kdrive/X server dependencies. The new Xorg
7 packages are quite different from the list we had regarding the previous
version (which referred to fc4 I think). I attach a .diff file which is the diff
between 2 "rpm -qa --last" commands. The first was from the clean "console-only"
installation and the later one was made after all the needed Xorg packages were
installed for kdrive to work. This is were Mr Kweskin had to leave...

>From now what I did was on my own. I am not a fedora user (I am a long time
gentoo user though), so don't flame me for any mistakes I might have done. The
rest could be considered as a first aproach of someone with no previous
experience on both fedora and rule-project.

After some fiddling with kdrive and defaultclientargs inside /usr/bin/startx, I
was able to get kdrive with Xfbdev working. Something quite important that I
really had to change was to add vga=788 inside the kernel command in
/boot/grub/grub.conf. Else I got no /dev/fb0 device and Xfbdev could not work.
Xneomagic did not work for me even though I tried various combinations of
settings. I can see the "X" running but it's full of artifacts/garbage and the
"Compaq" boot logo of laptop in the background. I don't know why this happens
and I couldn't fix it. Any ideas ?

Then I added blackbox as my window manager. I tried hackedbox too but I didn't
like it that much and seemed a bit "slower". Fluxbox is a _lot_ slower too.

Adding more packages is really easy with yum, yet there is a problem with yum
and old machines. As far as I know, yum is written in python and python is
quite slow. In order to make yum search for a package you need a lot of
patience and you need not touch the computer while yum runs. yum takes around
45 of my 64Mb ram while search the repos for a package and I have even seen it
take up 72Mb of RAM+SWAP space while installing various packages. This is
killing the machine. What is trully needed is a small application to search
through the repos. I've been told that apt-get is able to work on fedora too,
but I have not tried it yet. Are there any other alternatives faster than yum,
even only for searching through repos and not installing packages?

Another point I would like to make here is how bloated some fedora packages are.
I will show you this by comparing some binaries from debian (Damn Small
Linux), Gentoo (my home desktop PC) and Fedora (from rule-project laptop). I
know the versions differ, especially the DSL version is VERY old, but my point
is that since rule-project is about running new software on old PCs, maybe
something needs to be done here...
Take fluxbox for instance:

Fedora 0.9.15.1 :
# ldd /usr/bin/fluxbox
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0x00da7000)
        libSM.so.6 => /usr/lib/libSM.so.6 (0x00795000)
        libICE.so.6 => /usr/lib/libICE.so.6 (0x00a2f000)
        libXft.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXft.so.2 (0x007e8000)
        libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0x00111000)
        libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0x00d07000)
        libXpm.so.4 => /usr/lib/libXpm.so.4 (0x0075d000)
        libImlib2.so.1 => /usr/lib/libImlib2.so.1 (0x00995000)
        libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0x0014e000)
        libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x008b2000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x00dbf000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x00f81000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00d94000)
        libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0x003b1000)
        libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1 (0x001bc000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0x00259000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x004b5000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x001bf000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x004db000)
        libexpat.so.0 => /lib/libexpat.so.0 (0x0068e000)
        libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0x00c2e000)
        libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0x00669000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x00879000)
Total: 23 libs


Gentoo 0.9.14-gentoo-r1 :
# ldd /usr/bin/fluxbox
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
        libSM.so.6 => /usr/lib/libSM.so.6 (0xb7fd4000)
        libICE.so.6 => /usr/lib/libICE.so.6 (0xb7fbc000)
        libXft.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXft.so.2 (0xb7fa9000)
        libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1 (0xb7f82000)
        libexpat.so.0 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.0 (0xb7f62000)
        libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1 (0xb7f5a000)
        libXpm.so.4 => /usr/lib/libXpm.so.4 (0xb7f4a000)
        libImlib2.so.1 => /usr/lib/libImlib2.so.1 (0xb7ee0000)
        libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0xb7e6c000)
        libz.so.1 => /lib/libz.so.1 (0xb7e5a000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0xb7d8d000)
        libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0xb7d7e000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7d7a000)
        libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2 (0xb7d75000)
        libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/libstdc++.so.6
(0xb7ca5000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0xb7c82000)
        libgcc_s.so.1 => /usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.4.5/libgcc_s.so.1
(0xb7c79000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7b5f000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7feb000)

Total: 20 libs

debian (DSL)0.1.14 :
ldd fluxbox
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
        libSM.so.6 => /usr/lib/libSM.so.6 (0xb7f9c000)
        libICE.so.6 => /usr/lib/libICE.so.6 (0xb7f84000)
        libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0xb7eb7000)
        libXau.so.0 => not found
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7eb3000)
        libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 => not found
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0xb7e8f000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0xb7d78000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7fbc000)

Total: 10 libs

Even aterm in fc5 is bloated with libtiff, libAfterImage, libjpeg, libpng,
etc...I don't know how usefull are all these dependencies on old hardware.

The next problem I had with fedora was installing greek fonts and viewing greek
chars in websites with dillo. I guess this is probably because I am totally
inexperienced with fedora. But rule-project's installation did not install
anything in /etc/sysconfig/i18n. In fact there was no such file there. After
some friend's "rpm -qa" output from his full fc5 install I was able to see some
fonts I was missing. I installed them and now I can see greek chars in dillo.
Still no typing though and no greek chars in console. But I think I will manage
that too...sooner or later.

I am also attaching some pictures I took with a digicam of the laptop. I still
can't find any program to take screenshots in fedora with only a few decent
dependencies that will not waste all the precious resources of this old laptop
:)


Running new versions of software on old machines is something very very nice.
Even if was only for security reasons (which is not the case here) it would be
a great project. And rule-project is great. But aren't all these dependencies
from fc5 hogging down the system ? I might not be the best judge for this...but
imho fc5 looks a bit "heavy" for such a task.

keep up the good work!


-- 
Kargiotakis George            Network Operations Center
                              University of Ioannina, GREECE
kargig at noc.uoi.gr             Voice: +30-26510-97995
                              Fax:   +30-26510-97010
Public Key: http://users.uoi.gr/kargig/kargig.asc



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