Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

I tried some initial testing of BL3 some months ago on a 386sx 25 with 4MB
RAM.  I didn't get too far owing to some time constraints and the fact
that my M$ serial mouse wasn't working--didn't get to do much with Xvesa
for that reason.  I had occasion recently to go through some stuff I had
in storage and I happened to run across my mouse collection (flock?
herd?).  I grabbed another serial mouse and, when I hooked it up to that
computer, it worked fine!  I can't understand why the mouse manufacturer
should matter.

Anyway, I can continue a bit with my report now that the mouse works.  I
should mention that this is an early release of BL3--maybe 3.10.  I fired
up Xvesa (startx), just to see what would happen: there was quite alot of
swapping (10MB swap partition), as Steven said there would be.  Having
proved to myself his assertion that BL3 could not be run reasonably in gui
mode on such a machine, I decided to fiddle a bit with resolution.  This
old machine actually has onboard video with a whopping 256K of video RAM.
I managed to get it to do 800x600 resolution in 12-bit color, which was a
bit surprising.  But what I was really interested in was seeing how it
would do as an xterminal.  I did the necessary things to send the display
from a newer machine on my network and ran startxt.  Sure enough, a gui
app from the more powerful machine appeared on the screen of the 386: I
succeeded in starting nedit and firefox this way.  Despite the fact that
they appeared, however, everything was running as though immersed in a vat
of near-frozen molasses.  The mouse cursor was trailing behind the motions
I made with the physical mouse, and I had problems making pop-up menus
appear.  I'm not really trying to troubleshoot anything in reporting this
so much as I am trying to raise the question of whether a 386sx with 4MB
RAM can really act as an xterminal.  My initial experimentation indicates
it cannot.  It was as bad, performance-wise, as running the gui on the
machine itself.  Maybe minimum requirements should be upped?

A couple of further pertinent facts: this machine has a 10 BaseT card in
it (no other choice since it has only ISA slots) and 10/100 is supposed to
be the minimum for xterminals.  That said, I can report that I ran a BL2
machine (laptop) as an xterminal with a 10 baseT card and, while some
latency was apparent, it was nonetheless useable.  I don't think the
latency I was seeing with this 386 was due solely to the slow NIC.  Also,
I'm using an older version of BL3: might there be any improvement in using
the newer one?  I'm willing to try, if it seems a worthwhile experiment.
And finally, I'll just ask if you think upping the RAM in this machine
would make it useable as an xterminal?  I can't easily try that (no 30 pin
simms of larger size here), so it's sort of a theoretical question.  If
so, maybe the minimum requirements for BL3 as an xterminal need to be
upped to something like 8MB RAM for 386sx's?  Feedback appreciated.

James