Re: [pc110] NEW LINUX INSTALL ON 20MB PC110

Vaughan Pratt (pratt nospam at cs.stanford.edu)
Wed, 04 Mar 1998 07:35:36 +0000

>100 MB would be fine, if a bit tight, for a simple system, but I'm not sure
>about X Window. (I'm not running it). Remember that you need a swap
>partition, which is generally supposed to be at least as big as your RAM.

I'm running Linux on just 15MB compactflash including X-windows
(but not gcc) and netscape 2.0 (3.0 is just a bit too big for 15MB).
No swap but with 20MB RAM you can do a lot without swap. In addition,
on the 4MB flash I have all of Latex that one needs to produce dvi files
and preview them with xdvi, including all the fonts typically used in
CS theory papers (STOC/FOCS/LICS/ICALP/...).

>I'd be careful about assuming that you won't want to do too much with it,
>because once it works, you just might want to do more.

Not when you've only got 500KB free. :) You're too painfully aware of
what you're up against. That said, I'm delighted to have freed up both
PCMCIA slots in this way!

>I installed Slackware.

On 15MB it hardly matters whether you call it a Slackware subset or a
RedHat subset, it's too small to tell much difference (but basically I'm
using the Slackware layout, even though all my bigger toys run RedHat
5.0).

Vaughan Pratt