Dreaming of a lean installation method [was Re: *nix on

I'll expand on my original suggestion: fork something from the NetBSD 1.x line, call it ClassicBSD or OldSchoolBSD or whatever, pick a fairly fixed set of hardware to support and commit to keeping things small and stable. This includes the painful process of throwing things out (in the kernel and in userland) that aren't essential to keeping old gear running or flat too big to keep around. Something vaguely like the 4.3BSD-Quasijarus philosophy, but with less....weirdness. To be survivable, you'll need to make sure what you roll out is the most conservative set of things that can actually be maintained. You need to have the guts to put the foot down and say things like "Your favorite program is too big, too slow and way too much work to keep current on the kind of machines we support, so we won't even try to support it" and "even though one of the machines we want to support theoretically could have a USB card in it, almost all don't and we can save X amount of memory and Y amount of support time by stripping the whole subsystem out, so that's what's going to happen" or "SMP? No. Just no.". ClassicBSD would need to be about 'have to have' functionality, not 'nice to have' functionality. Just as long as we all agree NetHack stays. Note that "fork" != "stagnate". You'd need to build a community, but for a handful of committed folks folding security and other patches back in is straightforward if very time consuming, especially if you've already stripped out big, impractical stuff. Lots of projects do it with more or less success. BTW...if you aggressively avoid eye candy, even X11 can be relatively useful on old hardware. Strip out all the bloaty modules and drivers (you probably don't need OpenGL and font smoothing is a luxury you can't afford) turn off all the fancy options (no, you can't have opaque moves...not yours) and keep to a bare minimum WM. There are even lighter choices...fork a "classic" X release (like 11.3...as if your hardware supports any of the functionality added since then) or someone could raise from the dead/port MGR or some such. Ken