an observation, and question

[John G. Heim]

I install debian on machines comperable to the one you have all the time. 
For instance, I have a little computer that is intended for you to build 
your own wireless router. And I have a laptop with a 150 Mhz processor and 
54 Mb of RAM.

I think the trick is to install just the base system. During a debian 
install, a page comes up where you check off which groups of packages you 
want to install. You can uncheck everything, even the base packages and then 
your install will take only about 300 Mb of disk space. Even with a dialup 
connection it doesn't take 24 hours to download 300 Mb.

You will end up with an install that doesn't even have thinkgs like the more 
or tail commands but as you need these things, you can install them.




----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Gregory Nowak" <greg at romuald.net.eu.org>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, April 06, 2010 2:49 PM
Subject: an observation, and question


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> Hi all.
>
> A couple of days ago, I grabbed the debian stable netinst cd-rom image,
> and attempted to install debian on to a machine using that image. The
> machine is old, a Pentium running at 133 MHz, with 64 megs of ram,
> with no dvd drive, just a cd-rom drive.
>
> The installation went on for over 24 hours, and I powered off the box
> at that point, before it completed. Part of that time was spent
> idling overnight, waiting at the popularity contest
> question. Downloading standard packages, and updates, is also a
> contributing factor here. All that aside, while
> things would probably have gone faster if I had used a dvd, or had my
> own debian mirror locally, I think the major bottle neck here is the
> age, and abilities of the machine in question.
>
> I recall someone on here saying that the only distro that person could
> install on his old laptop is slackware. This then begs the question,
> is slackware the only distro that can still be installed on older
> hardware in a reasonable amount of time, (say 3-5 hours from start to
> finish), or are there others? Thanks
> for any feedback.
>
> Greg
>
>
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