Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

The 386 with 3MB RAM works to dial and telnet to my bbs, and to send files 
via plip to a 486 laptop (with many timeouts).  I do NOT recommend it if 
you have any other possibilities (such as using the 386 for DOS with epppd 
for DOS and the ftp and telnet programs found in Arachne, and/or kermit 
for DOS, and a DOS viewer lxpic, which even works online with lynx for 
DOS, the half-size non-NLS version).

Kermit for linux works but leaves 200K free RAM and took a few minutes to 
load. I did not bother trying to telnet with it.

zgv works.  It took 3 minutes todisplay a 50K jpg, of which 10 sec was 
actually drawing the image.  7K/sec video speed (our other 386 laptop did 
10K/sec).  On the 486 with 8MB RAM and better LCD screen it took 20 sec of 
which 2 sec was to draw the image.

With zgv you can zgv -g image.jpg to get greyscale or hit g while the 
image is onscreen IF it is 16-bit color.  With 256-bit color (greyscale) I 
did not notice any change by hitting g.  I don't think it would be worth 
trying to run graphical links2 in svgalib on this speed computer if one 
image takes 20 sec to display.

So a 386 SX20 with copro and 3MB RAM is not suitable for any sort of 
graphics with linux (it is okay but a bit slow with DOS) even svgalib 
(which is working fine on the 486 with 8-bit greyscale where X will only 
do 4-bit greyscale).  I am not going to bother testing the 386 with 5MB 
RAM with zgv or kermit as it has a dead keyboard and so does the 486 which 
works better, but I don't recall it being quite this slow.  It booted 
linux faster but I had no swap file and that took 1 min to load on this 
3MB RAM 386.  Why does it take so long to set up the swap file on HD?

The 486 did not need a swap file for zgv or links.

25MHz (DX?) Compaq Contura.  You cannot change the hard drive unless you 
have one of the 60 models on the list but BL3 in 20MB is quite adequate 
since the larger X programs won't work in 4-bit color (abiword, links2).

The Tempo 386 is fine for learning CLI linux on and if you have patience 
you can access a bbs with it and do file transfers.

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org