At the Clinic on sunday, a fellow brought in his Compaq R4000 laptop, and a Fedora 14 install disk, intending to combine them. The R4000 is a large beast with a big screen, but the RAM and disk and optical drives on the various R4000 versions range from pretty good to pathetic.
Unfortunately, his R4000 had 200MB of RAM, a 40GB hard disk, and (I'm guessing) a 4X CDROM reader. He wanted to split up that hard disk between WinXP and Fedora, and had used Partition Magic to make two 5GB partitions for Fedora. He was upset that Fedora would only install a minimal text-only system. I had other people to help (including a fellow who drove up from Salem at my invitation) so I did not figure out why. I was trying to steer him towards Damned Small Linux but he was having none of it. According to the Fedora website, the minimum install requirements for Fedora in RAM is 256MB for text and 384MB for graphics, with 512MB recommended. A complete set of packages could occupy as much as 9GB of hard disk. I knew that 200MB was too little, but I was unaware that Fedora would automagically install text-only in these circumstances, and refuse to install graphically when the space was not available. So I could not get the fellow to the "look, this doesn't work, you need more RAM or a leaner distro" realization. One of the harder tasks at the clinic is convincing people that their older hardware won't run newer distros. Yes, there is ten tons of free candy in that big pile, but you are not going to carry it all home in your little red wagon. It would be good to have a discussion of the latest supported distros and applications for older and smaller machines. As M$ turns a cold shoulder to folks with older hardware, we have an opportunity to gather lots of refugees. Conversely, for many devices (pocket computers) the emphasis is moderate capability consuming miniscule power. Those can also benefit from the leaner distros. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
