Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

Re swap space and compiling.

> Well, for that particular source code it worked without.  For larger 
> programs it might have crashed.  With swap partition it would probably be 
> a lot faster.  This was only 2K of source code.

The 2K was someone's guess.  It was probably more like 150 bytes, which is 
less than the free RAM (500 bytes).  I doubt a 2K program would have 
compiled in 500MB free RAM.
 > 
> > > Would it be possible to learn to compile with BL1 using 
> > > not libc5 but uClibc 
> > 
> > Yes.  uClibc is a C library.  It is able to handle most
> > standard C soucecode.
> > 
> > > and if so would it work better in low RAM?  
> > 
> > Probably.  That's why I hope to move BL3 to uClibc.
> 
> It sounds like Denton would greatly appreciate the next version of BL3.
> 
> 
> > > How much disk space does uClibc take up?
> > 
> > About half libc5.

I took a look at the site.  They offer a 17MB download of a packed
'toolkit' which I think includes gcc and kernel headers for kernel 2.4.  
Would BL3 be based on 2.4 if using uClibc?  The actual library looked like
less than 1MB, so it would fit okay, but the compiler seems to require
more hard disk than that for SW3 (BL1 and BL3).  I think they said it 
compiles programs a bit smaller than regular glibc - but they might be 
comparing with the latest version, not the older ones.  And uClibc does 
not support all the different types of computer that glibc does, just i386 
and I think one or two others, so it can be smaller for that reason.  

I was just given a pentium 166 laptop with 1.5G hard drive and 32MB RAM 
which I can put BL3 and BL2 and a few other linuxes onto without having to 
cut back to a single virtual terminal.  The same day someone asked if we 
knew anyone who could use a free 56K external modem!  I think Steven said 
various linuxes could share the same swap space but with 32MB I don't 
think I need swap space since I use one X program at a time.  How many MB 
would I want to leave for BL3 if I were to compile some of the larger 
programs on it, such as ghostscript?  I like BL3, it loads fast and has a 
simpler structure, but I need newer versions of some software than SW4.  
Is 300MB too much for BL3?  Could I compile with BL3 from source code in 
BL2 after mounting just part of a BL2 partition such as /src ?  

Sindi Keesan