Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Just a quick update on BL3.
>
> Mail is now working fine.  All that remains for me to
> do is testing and tidying (which should take about a
> week).  Today I ran BL3 with mem=4M and tried everything
> out.  Stand-alone X is (natually) too slow -- it swaps
> constantly.  However, when used as an X terminal (with
> remote applications), it runs pretty smoothly.  I think
> James will be happy with the performance on his 5mb
> machine.
>
> mem=5M still swaps badly for stand-alone X.
> mem=6M is much better.

Great to hear about the progress of your work, Steven.  Thanks so much for
your efforts.  I've been a bit "out of the loop" lately with another,
non-BL-related project, but I do intend to set aside time for testing and
feedback when things are ready for release.

It strikes me that this is really almost a different project than BL, and
should maybe be named according.  BL-xterm; BL-ltsp?  I think it has great
potential, especially for the many countries that are sort of behind
technically as compared to Western standards.  What you're enabling with
this release strikes me as being very similar to your old BL1 routine,
where you had hooked 2 486's together, installed X on one and most
applications on the other.  So, one was running the Xwindows system, and
the other the applications: sharing the load between the two made them
act, in concert, like a more up-to-date machine.  Is something similar in
view with BL3?  I could see someone getting ahold of a few old 386's with
6-8MB RAM, digging a P2 out of the dumpster (I recently rescued a P2 266
with 64MB RAM from the landfill) and maybe sticking some extra RAM in it,
making the P2 the application server (no X running on it, so more
resources are available for running apps), and setting up a little lab
that could do alot of things most would be amazed at given the limited
resources of each machine separately.  Do you envision that sort of thing?

Sounds exciting.

Thanks, James