*BSD News Article 84238


Return to BSD News archive

Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.netspace.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!news.stealth.net!news.idt.net!news.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!howland.erols.net!agate!nemesis.its.berkeley.edu!bob
From: bob@nemesis.its.berkeley.edu (bob prohaska)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: AMD 386sx with 4 megs; can it be done?
Date: 5 Dec 1996 03:35:35 GMT
Organization: Data Communication and Newtorking Services
Lines: 30
Message-ID: <585fu8$jba@agate.berkeley.edu>
References: <b58_9611301919@usbbs.com> <57vlqq$a93@james.freenet.hamilton.on.ca> <582gr8$64j@samba.rahul.net>
NNTP-Posting-Host: nemesis.its.berkeley.edu
istribution: world
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]

Hi all,

Just to finish the tale, FreeBSD 2.1.6 _can_ be installed on a
4 meg AMD 386sx with 70 megs of disk, but it takes some doing
and leaves a few loose ends which must be tied up manually.

Once a workable partition scheme was found (34 meg root and
/usr, 14 meg /usr/bin and 15 meg /usr/share, which turned 
out too big) the install ran fine until the system started
remaking devices. At that point it couldn't find chown.

When rebooted the kernel couldn't find swap devices, which
had to be made by hand. One of them spontaneously went away
overnight, which I find puzzling, but now they seem to keep 8-)

Aside from the missing /usr/sbin files (presently chown and
sendmail) the system appears to run fine. I'm trying now
to clean up enough space to download the kernel source
and try to build a smaller kernel. That should let me
see how it runs under load. I'm guessing that's about
5 megs beyond the 5 megs I have now, but does anybody know?

Do I stand any chance of simply copying /usr/sbin/chown from
a 2.2 June snapshot system? 

The notion of WeeBSD seems to have a chance ;-)

thanks for reading!

bob