slack on 486
 

(Tried this post with Dillo first, sorry if it appears twice.)

First post by a Newbie Slack. I use Mandrake daily but a while back i decided to install Slack 3.5 on an old 486 laptop because:
1) I'm nuts,
2) seemed like a challenge,
3) thought I'd learn a lot from a no frills distro.

So I have Slack running OK on the old beast (32MB RAM, 275MB for Slack, same for W95, floppy, no CD-ROM) with X and Blackbox. I'm using it mainly for learning vi, and dabbling in Bash, and writing basic letters and stuff with Ted.

Was wondering though, anyone know of any usefull apps made for this kind of low-juice setup? They would ahve to be self-contained because I don't have the space for the huge Gnome or KDE libraries-sets...

Also, the one really annoying thing is having to mount the floppy as root all the time using su. is there a way round this? I was thinking of writning a bash script, but I'm a ways off from the smarts for that...

cheers.

Here's some useful apps that worked on my p75 (not that far off from your 486)

Sylpheed (gtk email client - about a meg of disk space)
gaim (gtk aim client - about a meg of disk space)
Beaver (text highlighting IDE type program) - a little over a meg
xchomp (old pacman game that should run fine)
xbill - squash bill as he tries to infect your systems with windows

You might also think about using reiserfs for your filesystem. I've heard from numerous sources that it makes your disk access not only faster, but it ends up saving you space.

I think the way to get your floppy to work for users is like this in your /etc/fstab

/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy vfat noauto,user 0 0

and then make sure the user has the correct permissions on /dev/fd0

Yipes, to go from Slakc 3.5, er, 2.0.x kernel series, he would have to update glibc, gcc, the kernel, install reiserfsprogs, who knows what else in libs, and then copy everything to some other partition before switching the disk to reiser and copying back. That would be nasty, nasty work.

I did get Slack 8.0 on 330Mb once with gcc, glibc and a barebones X, so you might just want to upswitch. It runs great (after a 15 hour kernel re-compile!), and this is on a P1 100 24Mb RAM. I've got 8.0 on a few P1 133 1Gb HD 24MB ram laptops running fine too.

Cheers,

Finegan

slack on 486
 

tips duly noted. thanks folks.:)