New Toy

[aluminumspleen]

So, I've been dating my current girlfriend for almost four years, and I've known her and her family for about 10. However, her parents still don't approve of our relationship. But I am making progress, as evidenced by events of two nights ago.

After explaining to her mother in the most polite, most interesting, most intelligent way possible my active interest in computing, she began to tell me about an "old, crappy" computer she had upstairs. In a classic case of "one person's trash is another's treasure", I offered to take it off of her hands, and she let me take it. After I had loaded it into the car, I thanked her (for the hundredth time), and she hugged me and said "Good luck with it." EXCITING!!!

Anyways, it's a beautiful old Gateway that used to run Win98, with a whopping 64M of RAM, 4G storage, and a blistering 366 Celeron (a "budget" PII). I'm so psyched.

However, since there isn't a whole lot to work with on the computer, I knew I needed a small system. I know with LFS, you can get a really small system, so I thought, "What the hey", and started up on that. However, the first thing I had to compile was BinUtils, and while unzipping it, the thing crashed like the stock market. Fun stuff.

Anyways, I showed my friend, who's at school to be a mechanical engineer, and he had the brilliant idea of installing MS-DOS or Win3.1. Genius, right?

Well, it sounded cool at the time, and I could go for a little "Oregon Trail" so I went searching, first the basement, then torrent sites, for the setup disks (floppys!) for DOS. I finally found them, and tried to install it today. After taking three hours to try to format the whole 4G HD, it finally errored out, saying it didn't have enough memory on my primary partition.

What? I can't run a system from 1990 on my computer from 1998 because of space constraints? Wow.

Finally, I decided to step back to reality and install a real system (or as real as I can get!). If you've seen my other thread, you know that I've been having lots of fun on my other computer with CRUX. I know you can get CRUX really small and zippy, but you still have to compile the kernel.

So, my question is, do you think my system could handle a kernel compilation with 64M RAM and 366MHz without dying? I know if it did (by some miracle) work, it would take forever, but would it actually work? If not, I'm thinking just a minimal Debian should do the trick. Thanks!

[MikeTbob]

It *should* work, but then again, the DOS disks should have worked and LFS for that matter. You might want to have a good look at the MOBO on that thing, it might be torched.
I had Gentoo running on a 366 Mhz, but I had 256 MB of RAM too.

[rokytnji]

You could try Booting up a Damn Small Linux Cd to see if MikeTbobs idea on the mobo is on the money. I've booted up Damn Small Linux Current up and installed it on a P144mhz, 64mb ram , 2gig hardive , Compaq 1540 DM Laptop that didn't even have the bios capability to boot from cdrom. Have fun with the new toy.

[aluminumspleen]

The mobo is surely old, but I don't think it's trashed...in fact, I'm fairly sure it's not. I was able to boot up a GParted LiveCD to format the drive (that was actually how I found out the drive's size!). So, I'm pretty sure that means the mobo's OK, right?

I'm gonna try to install something on it tomorrow, we'll see how it goes. Until then, I've been having fun having it crash on every "heavy" liveCD I have

[Jonathan183]

So, my question is, do you think my system could handle a kernel compilation with 64M RAM and 366MHz without dying? I know if it did (by some miracle) work, it would take forever, but would it actually work? If not, I'm thinking just a minimal Debian should do the trick. Thanks!

I don't know if it will compile ... I have a system with 92MB RAM and Gentoo, it was taking a long time to compile X so I copied the partition, fired up another system and chroot'ed in and compiled X. When I copied the partition info back it worked Maybe you could try something similar or even stick the drive in another machine to do the compile.

[aluminumspleen]

Hey Jonathan, how would I do that? You mean like, physically take out the HD, put it in another computer, mount it, and chroot in to compile? Wouldn't the compilation turn out differently since the computers won't have the same specs? Or would the difference be minimal?

Copying the partition? I'm not exactly sure what this is. Could you clarify? Thanks, your response gives me hope that I may not have to go on a hunt for more RAM.

[questio verum]

'Spleen,
In my experience with DOS & later with windows, I found them to be quirky when it came to boot sectors and partition tables. Usually, running a quick hdd debug script (about 12 short lines in assembly) partitioning, & formatting would bring the drive back to a usable condition though. I can float you the script if you want it, but I think you would be better off with linux if you can load/compile it. (Of course.)

qv

p.s. I've got three 256MB sticks of PC100 sitting in an a/s bag at home. You're welcome to it if it would help. Just give me someplace to send it to.

[Jonathan183]

Physically remove the HD or copy the partition to a memory stick or something similar. You should then be able to boot from the Crux CD, mount the partition and chroot. I thought you were compiling the kernel so you tell the compiler what to make ... maybe someone more familiar with Crux can jump in ?

If you can get the memory that will improve how the system runs anyway

[aluminumspleen]

Hey all, thanks for all the help. I'm working on getting a wireless card working on the beast (fun stuff - never worked with ndiswrapper before!) so I can use apt-get, maybe.

Hey qv, thanks very much for the offer, but I think I can scrounge up some. I found a stick online for pretty cheap, worse comes to worst.