10 Apr
2007
10 Apr
'07
5:57 p.m.
Cameron Kaiser wrote:
What you want is a mini-kernel and userland. I fear very few modern distros
or even OSes will fit that bill.
It should still be possible; you don't need a mini-kernel for a 16MB
machine. Four years ago I installed FreeBSD on a 386sx16 with 8MB RAM
and it was fine. Don't recall which version of FreeBSD that was though;
might have been 2.7 (whichever was the last one to only require 5MB to
install). I booted from floppy and it installed itself over the
internet. The key, obviously, is not loading kernel modules you don't
need. Just don't expect XWindows, obviously. The only thing that stunk
was recompiling the kernel -- took 30+ hours (but was worth it since I
compiled out stuff I didn't need and shaved 1.5MB of kernel size, which
is significant on an 8MB machine.
You can always install the gentoo distribution on a faster PC, then
build a 386-optimized size-optimized target system and then boot the 386
with the compiled binaries and install... there are guides for doing
this on gentoo.org I believe.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
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It seems that you could take a fork of NetBSD 1.x and
have something useful
to build on.
That sounds quite reasonable, but you are then working with an old
system. What I really dream of is a system which is kept current,
updated but not bloated. I mean, I don't want great, fancy features
but a system which is not 5 or more years old, but current.