[wplug] debian install: a glimmer of hope, and a new Q

[Matthew Danish]

On Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 04:19:11PM -0700, Elwin Green wrote:
> One of the oft-quoted advantages of Linux is that it
> works on anything from a 386 up, but for three+ years
> now, all current versions that I've known of have
> required at least a pentium processor and 1G hard
> drive space for a full install.

Current versions of Linux meaning kernels 2.2 and 2.4?

I've installed fairly recent versions of debian on 486 machines with 16
MB of RAM and in < 100 MB of HD space.  It's all a matter of not
selecting lots of packages.  I'm not sure what the current minimum is,
but it used to be installable on a 386 with 8MB of RAM with ~60MB of
disk space.  There are distributions designed to fit into smaller.
Actually, newer versions of Debian may have to drop the 386, due to some
libc/gcc/kernel (I can't remember) feature that won't work there.  But
still, a Pentium shouldn't be necessary--however can you still find
486s? =) I got rid of mine a while ago.

-- 
; Matthew Danish <mdanish at andrew.cmu.edu>
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