Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Sun, 22 Jun 2003, Day Brown wrote:
>
> Ah, well, one of the tradeoffs of country life. Have you seen 4meg 30
> pin dram offered for sale  online? I have several 486 (many with VLB)
> boards, and am also looking for some socket 4, 5vdc CPUs to upgrade
> with.
>
> I'm hoping to assemble something that can surf with Mozilla. Arachne
> dont cut it anymore, too much JAVA & flash crap results in errors &
> crashes.  Functionally, a dos text mode destkop is gonzo easier to deal
> with than the terminal mode of a multi-user multi-tasking os. I dont
> need 'permissions' and it dont ask me to logon with a password.
>
> But if then BASICLINUX can fire up a GUI browser, that's all I need. I'm
> not trying to run a network.
>
"486," "30 pin dram" and "Mozilla" do not belong together in the same
sentence.  Steven runs Mozilla on a BL2 install, but that's on a P 166
with 64MB RAM.  That's probably close to the bottom end in terms of system
resources required to make Mozilla run tolerably.  I guess 32MB RAM
*might* work, though I haven't tried it.  If you wanna try Mozilla on a
486, it better be a DX4 100-120 with 64MB RAM.  I can assure you that with
anything less you'll be totally exasperated.  Lesser systems have run
Opera 6.03 for some on this list, though 32MB RAM should probably be a
minimum there for reasonable performance.  I tried Opera 6.12 on a 486
DX2 66 with 20MB RAM (30 pin simms) and it was quite an exercise in
patience.  I don't think I could put up with it on a routine basis.  To
get around the multi-user stuff in BL, you could always set up your
machine to automatically log you in as root user.  I've forgotten which
init script one edits to get this, though I'm sure Steven has that
information ready-to-hand.  That way, you'll never get asked for username
and password that way, and you'll have full rights to do whatever you want
with anything on the system.

James