I'm running a 386 with 4M RAM and a 40M HDD. Slink (Debian 2.1) takes about 33M of free HDD space to install, in addition to the virtual memory swap space and a 2M temporary root partition.
The minimum amount of swap needed is determined by the peak in VM usage that occurs when the device drivers are being setup, 6M is the magic number, iirc. You can lower this dramatically by deleting unnecessary device drivers immediately after you load them off the floppy. I have 6144k of swap, 2048k of which was the temporary root partition during the installation. If I had another 10M I would put at least 4M of it towards swap space. The ~33M comes mainly from the combined size of the gzipped (9 or 10M) and gunzipped base archive, there is nothing you can do about it. You can gain some space after the fact by the judicious removal of stuff you don't need, or don't need online. Possibilities include: locales, keytables, fonts, documentation, etc. (I pruned over 6M off the base like this, the "etc." bit is where you really start learning about how the system works ;). As far as usability goes... You will have a console only machine (no Xwindows). It would probably be best to tour around the web based package tree (the Packages link off the home page) and see if you will be able to run everything you need without X, or in the space you have available (hard to judge because you never know how much of a package _needs_ to be on the machine). You will be able to get all of perl (and python, sans graphics) on the system, but don't count on compiling (gcc) anything unless you are willing to strip the system down to the bare bones (and compile nothing larger than "hello world"). In short, you can do it and may even end up with a decent although somewhat specialized box... if you don't mind getting your hands dirty and doing it one piece at a time (requires planning). - Bruce --- On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Vincent Murphy wrote: > i want to install linux (debian if possible) on a 386SX with 4MB RAM and > a 51MB HD. it will have an ISDN terminal adapter and a 3c509 network > transciever. can i use debian? if i can't, how do i go about it? i'm > open to suggestions about other (*BSD?) kernels. > > TIA.. > > -vinny
