On Thu, 24 Feb 2011 14:26:54 -0800 Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> dijo:
>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. > >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. Several thoughts come to mind: 1) The Compaq R4000 can take up to 2 GB of RAM, and hard disks plenty large enough. It also comes with nVidia graphics that can drive a screen up to 1680 x1050, although not all R4000s come with that kind of screen. My point is that the gentleman in question could easily upgrade his R4000 to at least enough RAM to do the job, at a fairly cheap price. 2) The Compaq R4000 was my first Linux computer. I bought it brand new from Compaq. This was back in the day when Breezy was the reigning version of Ubuntu. I brought it to a Clinic at Riverdale School and, after a couple hours of futzing with various 64-bit distros, I finally got the screen running at 1680 x 1050 with Breezy. I later returned the R4000 to Compaq after discovering that it was impossible to get the wireless working, not even ndiswrapper would work. I replaced it with an R3240, which served me well for two and a half years until I gave up due to a hardware fault in the motherboard. Having said all that, my R4000 (and R3240) came with 60 GB hard drives and 2 GB RAM, because that is the way I ordered them. 3) You say his R4000 had 200 MB RAM, but that sounds odd. There are two slots, so he could have had 192, 256, or some other multiple of 64, but I don't see how he could have 200 MB. Not that it really matters, as none of these numbers is sufficient. In fact, I can't imagine that it would even run Windows if it has only 200 MB. (It comes with 32-bit XP). >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. It would also be good to have a few RAM chips that we could sell to people like the gentleman with the R4000. In practically every case where we have had someone bring in an underpowered computer, the computer could have taken additional RAM, if only we had some available. Too bad I gave away the two 512 MB chips that I had. They would have solved the problem with the R4000 right off. I need to make a trip to Free Geek to donate a few items. Perhaps before the next Clinic I can pop into the thrift store ask what kind of RAM they have available and pick up a few miscellaneous sticks. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
