[wplug] comparing distros (was: iso small distros)

[David Gerard Matthews Jr.]

While we're on the subject of comparing different small distros for
wierd old machines, could anybody recommend the best *BSD variant for a
486SX?  I was digging around in my parents' attic this afternoon, and
found my old 486 (which I thought they had given away years ago) sitting
there all packed up.  It occurred to me that it might be fun to try some
random OS's and distros on it, and I thought *BSD might be a good place
to start, but I know bloody little about the BSD's and almost nothing
about the differences between them (except that NetBSD runs on
everything, OpenBSD's security obsessed, blah; blah.)
The box in question has 12 MB of RAM (I don't care about X although I
did run X on the machine a few years ago when I put RH 5 on it), a 1 gig
HD and a 200 MB HD, and a Creative CD-ROM (does *BSD support
non-IDE/SCSI CD's?).   It doesn't have a NIC, so a network install is
out unless someone feels like loaning me a supported ISA NIC.
Thanks,
dgm

mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu wrote:
> 
> On Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 10:25:08AM -0800, Elwin Green wrote:
> >
> > Greetings, all -
> >
> > First, thanks for the responses to my previous post. I've decided to go with
> > debian for now, because I really liked the documentation given at their
> > website.
> >
> > However, I want to emphasize that that was my ONLY reason for choosing
> > debian over slackware in this instance. Otherwise, I know next to nothing
> > about the differences between them. Which leads to my next question: can
> > anyone point me to an aricle, website, or book that offers detailed
> > comparisons between distros?
> Hrm, plenty of flamewars =)
> 
> >
> > The key word there is "detailed". All that I've read so far comes down to
> > statements like "distro x is easier to install," or "distro y is better for
> > the enterprise." I'm looking for something that would say, "distro x uses
> > runlevel 4 for a graphical login, and distro y uses runlevel 5," or "distro
> > x and distro y both place xFree's config file in location abc, and distro z
> > places it in location def." Or for that matter - something that would tell
> > me the functional difference, if any,  between a deb and an rpm (and not
> > just tell me that one format is debian's and the other is red hat's).
> If it's information like this, I suggest consulting the various distributions'
> documentation and analyzing it yourself.  I can tell you right away that you
> will find information about things like "where is such-and-such file" and
> "this is how packages lay things out" for Debian in the Debian Policy Manual
> and related documentation (mini-policy guides, etc), http://debian.org/devel.
> Redhat must have something similar, I imagine, as do other distributions,
> to one extent or another.
> 
> I know a good site comparing package formats:
> http://www.kitenet.net/~joey/pkg-comp/
> 
> But your best tool is going to be Google, and the documentation of the
> distribution in question, I imagine.  Or simply install them all, which is
> what I did several years ago, when I had gotten my new laptop.  I got the
> cheapbytes mondo pack of Linux and BSD and went through every CD.
> 
> --
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> ;; Matthew Danish                         email: mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu ;;
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