Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Sun, 11 Jul 2004, Denton He wrote:

> But can BL1 guarantee ease of use? All i want to do with GCC is to compile 
> some simple programs in the vicinity of helloworld.c. So I think my RAM 
> should be okay.
> 
> 
> Denton
> 

I have a 386 laptop with 3MB RAM that can work (borderline) with BL3,
without images (4MB might be enough to use seejpeg in greyscale with
switch -g online with links-0.90, particularly if you modify BL3 to have
just ONE not THREE terminals), but it works just fine in DOS with the
viewer lxpic and the text browser lynx (the version without NSL, not the
full version), and with the dialler (miniterm) and ftp and telnet programs
provided with Arachne for DOS, or with DOS kermit. Arachne browser is also
usable if you delete all the icons and it helps to use vga greyscale not
color.  It also works with Nettamer - ftp, telnet (vt100 is not quite
correct), mail, and a very old browser.  The short version of lynx may not
be posted but I can send it to you.  There is also Bobcat in versions for 
XT and 386, a port of lynx for really old machines.  I don't know how up 
to date it is.  DOS lynx is very up to date.

Have you considered using your 40MB hard drive and 4MB RAM 386 laptop with
DJGPP, the DOS port of GCC?  I think it occupies about 12MB disk space.  
I can check if you want, as we put both that and BL1 with compiler on the
same 486 with 12MB RAM.  Compiling is pretty slow even with 12MB RAM, and
I think it is slower in DOS than in linux, but the DOS kernel is smaller,
leaving more RAM for compiling in.  DJGPP supports C++ as well as C.  You
need to download several files and can probably skip the one for C++ if
you just need C, and maybe also the debugger if you are short on space.  
Of course DJGPP won't produce programs you can run in linux, but it looks 
like you are just interested in learning basic programming anyway.  The 
source code for DOS programming sometimes needs to be modified slightly 
from linux code - for instance we discovered you cannot use PI as a 
variable because it is already defined in the DOS version.


Write me directly if you want more info from my partner on this.  He was
taking a programming course in C++ (C is no longer offered) and wanted to
use something other than the Windows compiler at school so he brought his
own.  He used DJGPP rather than BL3 sometimes because he wanted to use his 
own DOS text editor to modify the code and then compile the changed code 
without switching between operating systems.  

Steven, how much space do you think would be needed on hard disk for BL3 
without X, and with a compiler?  Subtracting 8M from 40 for swap space 
leaves 32, possibly minus a small DOS partition.  Is this enough? I think 
you said the BL3 kernel took up about 2.5MB RAM.  Is there some way to 
load only selected parts of the kernel using some switch?

I think the DOS kernel occupies much less space but I forget how much.   
Under 500K, considering that I can use 512K of the 1MB in an XT after 
loading DOS, and there is also some free memory left over 640.  Maybe 
300K?  In this case it might be faster to compile in DOS, if you have 
twice as much free RAM to compile in.  The DOS compiler does access memory 
beyond 1MB.