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List:       mandrake-cooker
Subject:    RE: [Cooker] Minimal install -> i686
From:       Don Head <DHead () wavetech ! com>
Date:       2001-08-31 23:10:57
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>                         "All we are saying
>                        Is give min a chance"
> 
> <style="long sigh">
> Yet another man who would sign the Holy Minimal Install 
> petition, if it 
> existed... Personally, I've lost the hope that Mandrake will 
> change its 
> vision to a smarter installation. Mandrake focuses on the number of 
> packages, assuming that developers are constantly *improving* their 
> applications. But this is not true : new bugs are commonly introduced 
> with latest features. Also, staying "on the bleeding edge" is 
> the best 
> thing to do if you want to break what used to work (how many "broken" 
> reports on this list?). Mandrake looks like someone who would build a 
> huge stone castle upon the sand. You never know if the next 
> stone will 
> swallow an entire part of the castle, or if it will fit 
> nicely. In a few 
> French words, I would say : "c'est un peu trop le bazar pour en faire 
> une cathédrale". But that's only my worthless opinion.
> </style>

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like you're mixing
two issues here, and only one of them really has some
relevancy to what guran and I are looking for.

The "bleeding edge" issue I actually like when it comes to
a number of projects; MySQL, Apache, PHP, FreeCiv,
KDE/Konqueror, etc.  Yes, "bleeding edge" in a
distribution with a lot of packages is even worse, but
that, IMHO, doesn't really have anything to do with
installation architectures, goes against my personal
beliefs (I use Mandrake *because* of it's
"bleeding-edginess" (and it's open development model, which
I *REALLY* like)), and is a discussion that should be taken
to another thread.

> Anyway, for your request, were there many differences in the 
> instructions sets of 80386 and 80486? Compiling for 486 is useless if 
> the instruction sets are the same.

The biggest distinction is probably in math-coproccessors;
later 486's had them, no guarantee with 386's and early
486's.. I think that makes a difference in the kernel.

> Also, 386 based-PCs had 
> BIOSes that 
> could not deal with hard drives larger than 528 MB. Are such 
> harddrives 
> sufficient for Linux-Mandrake, even if the minimal install existed? 
> Latter 486s did not have this limitation, hence are perhaps better.

I don't think hard drive space is an issue.  I'm sure I
could get myself a really nice firewall box, kitchen
terminal, or bathroom newsgroup reader box in under 528MB,
in fact, I should be able to do it in 250MB or less.  I
have an old 386 laptop with like an 80MB drive.  The only
distro I can put on there is Slackware, mainly because I
can install from floppies.  One day I'd like to stick
Mandrake on there.  It's great for ssh/telnet, pine,
swatch, and links/lynx.


Don Head
SAIR LCA, CIW-P, i-Net+, Network+, A+

Systems Administrator      [ donhead@linux-certified.org ]
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