Why does it need that much hard disk space?

[Buddy Brannan]

On Wed, May 08, 2002 at 02:58:27PM -0400, Ann Parsons wrote:
> Hi Buddy,
> 
> Nope, you explained it very well indeed.  Now, care to take the next
> step, which I am not knowledgeable enough to try?  Send a short list
> of the things that are *really* needed in a Linux installation.
> 
> Lemme see if I can start.  
[...]
> First, you need the kernel.  

...And bash. You'll need bash, or some other shell. Course, I think
all distros install one of these by default :)

> 
> then you need some kind of editor, VI Emax whatever, an editor.  
> 
> You'll probably want the C libraries for yourself, or for anyone
> tinkering on your system.
> 
> You'll want Lynx and its attendant libraries.
> 
> You'll want the curses stuff too.

Absolutely you want the NCurses stuff. unches of stuff won't work
properly without it. 

> 
> You'll want the alsa stuff for your sound card and its attendant
> stuff.

If by "attendant stuff" you mean the mixer, setup utilities, and so
on, absolutely. If you mean audio programs in general, let me
elaborate: 

You want sox (and all the scripts that do things with it, like play
for instance). ALSA of course coms with a .wv player and
recorder. You'll want trplayer and the RealAudio libraries if you want
RealAudio streaming media. MPG123 or MPG321 or freeamp won't go amiss,
and neither would the OGG Vorbis tools. But of course, you don't need
them. And Speak Freely is fun as well.

> 
> You'll want a mailer, Pine, MUT or something.

...As well as fetchmail (probably) and a mail transport (sendmail,
exim, or qmail)

> 
> You'll want the stuff for your network card if you have one or the PPP
> stuff for dialup.  

...The support for both is in the kernel, but you'll certainly need
pppd for dialup, and wvdial is very nice. And don't forget useful
network and diagnostic things like ping, traceroute, etc. ...  But all
the network stuff generally goes in all at once, or a lot of it does
anyway. Also telnet and ftp clients (ncftp and lftp are nice ftp clients)

> 
> That should do you, I think.  Have I forgotten anything, Buddy? 
> 

I think that we've go it covered, mostly. It sounds quite a bit bigger
than it is, and bear in mind also that the architecture is quite a bit
different than Windows--that is, you need more supporting things in
Linux for stuff to work, (C libraries, NCurses, etc.), which makes the
whole system more efficient as a program can call up common components
and not be bloated with extra code duplicated elsewhere. (Well, it
sounds good, anyway.) 
-- 
Buddy Brannan, KB5ELV/3  | I choose you to take up all of my time.
Email: davros at ycardz.com | I choose you because you're funny and kind
                         | I want easy people from now on.
                         | --the Nields