8 Jun
2013
8 Jun
'13
8:07 a.m.
On Sat, 8 Jun 2013, Mr Ian Primus wrote:
--- On Sat, 6/8/13, Tothwolf <tothwolf at
concentric.net> wrote:
Nope, many use tasksel and accept the defaults (as inefficient as they
are). I'd be all for scrapping tasksel, but others would scream...
Actually tasksel itself isn't the problem, its the individual "task" files
bundled with tasksel that are poorly constructed. Even the base install
will install some useless cruft though, and a careful audit will find a
number of things that can be uninstalled.
A current Debian distribution such as 6.0
(squeeze) or 7.0 (wheezy)
should work on a 486, at least in console mode (I've not even
considered trying to run current X11 on one) but you'll need as much
memory as you can install plus lots of hard drive and a swap partition.
Installation would also likely be very slow, and you'd want to deselect
everything in 'tasksel' during installation (unless you have at least
2GB of hard drive space, but even then it will install a lot of useless
stuff) and manually install whatever packages you need after letting it
install the base OS.
Isn't that how everyone installs Debian? Just run the installer for
base, and install manually what you want, when you want it? Tasksel is
pretty broken and installs all kinds of useless junk. I'm running a recent version of Debian (5.0) on a
486/66 with 32 megs of
RAM. It runs great, and it's one of the most stable, constantly on boxes
I have. It's mostly just a utility box, but it does it's job well. Of
course, no X, but it's not like I need X not like I'm going to try to
run a browser on a 486, and that's about all you need X for. I compiled
a custom kernel for this machine to trim down the memory footprint, I'm
running 2.6.37, with just what I need added. The root filesystem is a 1
gig partition on a 1.2 gig drive - the rest of which is used for swap. I
think I'm only using 400 megs.
Linux runs fine on older hardware. Sure, it's a bit sluggish - ssh, for
instance, is pretty processor intensive, and is slow to initiate on a
machine this old. This is to be expected. Compiles are also very slow -
building the kernel took well over a day. But, by and large, most stuff
runs OK, and the system is very usable. Definitely would not want to run
X, however...
You can speed up ssh a good bit if you force the use protocol 1 instead of
protocol 2 since protocol 2 is more CPU intensive. Most sshd packages
today have only protocol 2 enabled though so you'd have to add protocol 1
to /etc/ssh/sshd_config (see the sshd_config manpage) and then supply '-1'
to the ssh command. For internal use on a private network, protocol 1 is
probably fine, but for a machine with ssh open to the world, protocol 2
should be enforced.