Used the standard images and ran it on 486dx66 with 20m ram. No faster than W95 (tuned) and about the same as WinNT4.0/workstation. The Xserver is the limiter as it's served not native graphics on the 486 it's noticeable. It seemed robust enough but faster... not really. I also don't care that the kernel fit on a 1.44mb disk (useful for LRP maybe) as the useful config has to have a lot more around it for a user workstation. When you reach that point it's big, like needing a 1gb disk big. Therein lies the probelm with linux: Slackware, mandrake, redhat, cladara and howmany more all different? Reminds me of CPM2.2, all teh same cpm but modem programs were not always portable and media was often different. Same but, not really. Allison

No, monopoly bad. Lack of widely accepted standards worse. the latter comming from those that would alter it a little to five themselves a small (hoping for larger) advantage. Allison

I have one those AMD5x86/133s, it's faster(it's a large cache 486/133) but same results. Swap was 40mb was 40mb is all cases. W95A is not the fasest version. I used W95C without IE/WOW/Plus packages installed and NS3.01 as the browser makes a huge difference hence my comment (tuned). The hotest W9x setup is W98se stripped and the W95A shell. You need both and something called 98lite20 to build it. It's akin to doing a system specific build under linux. I run several systems with W95C, Office97(excel, word), IE401, outlookexpress and paradox in 420mb with ~200mb free. The cpu is 5x86/133. That's about par. Freebsd is better from my experience. I've run that on EVERYthing from 386/16 (4mb ram) up and it is clearly faster than linux, win9x or NT. At least for the 2.2.6 release. Still doesn't beat my 6mhz Z80/64k with BM(bubbles memory), ramdisk and floppy. ;) Which WPoffice? I have Caldara Openlinux 2.2 and 2.3 and WP8 is fine under KDE. Just has a huge footprint on teh disk though. Only if IObyte was implemented (often it was not). There were a lot of poor BIOS implmentations that really hurt the performance and useability of CP/M. lack of typeahead was my pet peve due to lack of interrupts and poor modem performance (same reason). Allison

On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 09:16:40AM -0400, allisonp(a)world.std.com wrote: Boy things have changed. When I first got into Linux, I ran it on a 40 MB MFM drive and had lots of space to spare. Of course that was no TCP/IP and certainly no GUI crap, and it didn't even have vi. But it might be a fun exercise to put together a similarly minimal config from the latest sources, it would probably still fit in a couple of cylinders of a modern disk drive. Certainly when Alpha Linux started out, a lot of people were running it from Zip drives on their Nonames. Those are just different distributions, they all generally use the standard kernels, it's mainly the layered crap and startup scripts that are different and most of the differences are cosmetic. It's not at all hard to build executables that will work fine on any of them, just don't hard-code all your path names, but the system calls will work fine. John Wilson D Bit

The kernel just needs to be build with make bzImage (this is the replacement for the gzipped zImage...) Lilo handles it just fine after that. Bill -- bpechter(a)monmouth.com | Microsoft: Where do you want to go today? | Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow? | BSD: Are you guys coming, or what?

On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 04:05:56PM -0400, allisonp(a)world.std.com wrote: I can't forgive A.T. for the anti-assembly-language advocacy in his comp arch textbook, the guy makes absolutely no sense -- he "proves" the correctness of his personal bias using an anecdotal example where he varies every parameter at once and then tries to draw conclusions. But if Minix is "free" now, that must mean that at least he changed his mind about the bizarre licensing rules he used to have. IIRC it was ~$100 for the book+code and you could install "a few" copies, whatever that means. John Wilson D Bit