Re: A 4meg linux box ...

Jacques Gelinas (jack@solucorp.qc.ca)
Thu, 30 May 1996 23:49:01 -0400 (EDT)


On Mon, 27 May 1996, Derrik Pates wrote:

>
>
> On Sat, 25 May 1996, Lauri Tischler wrote:
>
> > > A 4M linux box functions very well as a small router or 4 port term server
> > > or X terminal. I have a 2M compaq laptop which is a very useful tool for
> > > all sorts of small tasks, ie traceroute,ping,ftp,telnet via ppp or ethernet.
> > > Makes a cheap sniffer with tcpdump.
> Yeah, a _very_ small router. And an X terminal? The XFree86 docs say that
> X functions _very slowly_ under 4 meg. They recommend at least 8 meg to
> do any real work.

I am running a 486 DX/33 with 4 megs as an X terminal. It has a cirrus
logic 5429 Vesa. 4 megs is a little bit short, so I put an old drive on
it only for swap (it boots using nfsroot). Swapping is barely noticeable
generally when switching screens.

I have no problem running the following things on it

Netscape
WordPerfect 6.0
Doom
Abuse

These application are often loaded at the same time. The server is a
486 dx/2 with 16 megs of ram btw.

Scrolling and painting is quite fast. Scrolling through a netscape page
full of icon is generally as fast as you can move the mouse. No wave, no
glitch. It is certainly fast enough (perfect I feel) for office work.

Few days ago I have played DOOM on it with my son while the server was
compiling a kernel (The server is also running X). DOOM was playable, no
kidding.

--------------------------------------------------------
Jacques Gelinas (jacques@solucorp.qc.ca)
Use Linux without reformating: Use UMSDOS.