[Rule] Summary/random thoughts on RULE

[Liam Proven]

On 06/09/07, rkwesk at hellug.gr <rkwesk at hellug.gr> wrote:
> Quoting Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
>
> snip
> Well, Liam, my extra light (less than 1.5 kgs!) laptop is a P1 at 266
> and I now run bang up to date Debian Etch on it. The extra hiccup has
> been the necessity of compiling a Debian (from Debian sources) Sid
> kernel (2.6.22) in order not to have a running of repeated error
> messages that fill up logs and scroll the console screen.
>
> A minimal xorg with icewm runs fairly reasonably as well. It may well
> be better to "adopt" another distro but I am pleased with Debian.

If the batteries in my cherished IBM Thinkpad "Butterfly" (486DX4/75,
40MB RAM) had not perished, I'd be running Debian on it, too.
Slackware is too primitive for my tastes and they are about the only 2
distros left to usefully support such low-spec kit.

But my point remains: I think that chiefly only the enthusiasts are
running such kit any more. The baseline free kit now is a fast PII or
more commonly a PIII at 500-1000MHz, with a couple of hundred meg of
RAM and half a dozen gig of disk or more. It is probably all-PCI with
quite likely no ISA slots.

Machines like this are actually reasonably served by distros: ZenWalk,
SaxenOS, DeliLinux, Arch, CRUX & VectorLinux are all currently
maintained. And of course Xubuntu, installed, and this is important,
from the "Alternate" text-mode CD, not from the desktop CD, which is
ridiculously slow on low-end kit.

For kit that is lower-end still - the era of 66MHz FSBs and PC-66
SDRAM or slower (EDO, FP-mode DRAM in SIMMs) - well, given that things
like Debian and Slackware still support this, if an enthusiast wants
to run such a machine, they can.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AOL/AIM/iChat: liamproven at aol.com • MSN/Messenger: lproven at hotmail.com
Yahoo: liamproven at yahoo.co.uk • Skype: liamproven • ICQ: 73187508