Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

Below was posted to baslin@topica, posting here to perhaps continue 
discussion on ibiblio:

>   From: sindi keesan <keesan2 AT cyberspace.org>
>Thanks, I will try this.  Never thought of clicking on a blank spot.  I
>tried the various areas of the colored stripe.  Is twm also supposed to
>let you run two programs at the same time and if so how would that work? 
>(Not that I have two X programs that I want to run, until there is some
>good browser available).  First we need to get Redhat working again in a
>new body (we put together nine 486 computers to send to Eritrean schools
>for use with Linux, one of which had Redhat on it). 
>
Excuse me for butting in, but I highly recommend *against* putting RedHat on 
those systems.  I have some recent experience with this.  I set up a Pentium 
75 for myself recently with a 600MB HD and 32MB RAM using RH 6.2.  
Immediately after the install, the hard drive was 90% full!  The default 
window manager was Gnome, which was a bit much for that system.  Switching to 
fvwm helped performance a bit.  But mainly I was unhappy that I had virtually 
no HD space to work with.  I kept my eye open for alternatives and finally 
spotted Vectorlinux.  What an improvement!  Installing Vectorlinux gave me a 
full complement of software (email client, ftp client, browser (Opera), Lynx, 
wordprocessor/editor) and choice of 2 lightweight window managers (icewm and 
xfce) - all in only 350Mb of diskspace!  It's incredible what this distro can 
do for old hardware.  That machine has become just as useable (though slower, 
of course) as my much newer system.  I'm sold on Vectorlinux for older 
machines.  If you want a system with lots of bells and whistles that runs 
easy on resources and a minimal amount of system tweaking, this is the one to 
use.  I would not consider putting any other "full blown" distro on a 486 or 
P1.  For a 486, I would recommend version 1.8 of Vectorlinux.  It installs in 
only about 185MB of disk space (the 350MB I mentioned above was for 
Vectorlinux 3, which uses the 2.4.19 kernel, and would be good only for 
faster 486's with lots of RAM [32 MB or more]).  1.8 uses the 2.2.17 kernel.  
Anyway, I suggest you put Vectorlinux rather than RH on those boxes.  End of 
plug for Vectorlinux.

James