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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.hawaii.edu!news.uoregon.edu!news.sol.net!uwm.edu!math.ohio-state.edu!news.cyberstore.ca!skypoint.com!newshub.tc.umn.edu!zib-berlin.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: xxxBSD on older 386 machines ? Date: 17 May 1996 21:43:17 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 31 Message-ID: <4nirtl$76a@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4neo82$2c6@bullet.oh.sub.org> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E berni@bullet.rhein-neckar.de (Berni Ernst) wrote: > I wanna run an Unix System on an old Compaq Porty Machine. > This is a 386/25 with only 4 megs of ram and a small 40 MB > Harddisk. > The machine doesn't offer any expansion slots, so networking > seems to be impossible ( or will a parallel adapter work ?). > can anybody recommend an operating system for this machine? > > the Compaq is only for use in the garden or on the veranda and > write some text and a little bit for simple c-programming. I'm running FreeBSD on an oldish 386sx/16 with 5 MB RAM. Well, ``running'' is perhaps an overstatement. I'm using SLIP as its network connection, albeit the bandwidth is lower than floppy transfers, it's more convenient. I get about 8 KB/s peak rate at 115200 Baud, even though this is only on a dumb UART. The 40 MB disk will only allow you to put a hand-selected subset of all the binaries there. After all, with only 4 MB RAM, you need some swap space as well. (My notebook originally had a 120 MB disk. I've got everything reasonable onto it, including X11 and the X11 develop- ment environment and Emacs... :) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)