Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Tue, 25 Apr 2006, sindi keesan wrote:

> A friend with a 120GB hard drive on his desktop made the mistake of giving
> WinXP the whole hard drive and now he is trying to run an astronomy
> program which is available for Redhat/SuSE, Cygwin, or FreeBSD.  He tried
> putting FreeBSD on his 'old' laptop but it filled up 4GB before he could
> put on his astronomy program.  It uses a viewer FITS which requires X,
> otherwise the package will run CLI.
>
> Is there any reason you really need Redhat or SuSE, or would BL3 with some
> library upgrades be likely to work?  He said the package has a lot of
> dependencies but is not all that large itself.
>
> He would ideally like to be able to use his USB CDROM drive plugged into a
> PCMCIA USB adaptor, but he does have a wireless PCMCIA card which he can
> probably get going in FreeBSD in a smaller partition to download whatever
> BL/Slackware files he might need at a public library.
>
> Cygwin only lets him run one program at a time.  There is no qemu version
> - is the Redhat version likely to run in qemu?  Should he attempt to set
> up a BL-based linux and use some rpm installer with it?  He is more
> familiar with BSD but is learning Cygwin.   Is anyone on this list
> familiar with it?  He would rather have the package on his laptop to take
> to the local observatory to do spectrometry with, as a hobby.
>
> He may not need any window manager.  He filled 4GB with FreeBSD and no
> desktop (such as GNOME) by adding all the packages containing any
> dependencies he thought he needed.

Alot of alternatives, I'd say.  First, he could shrink that Win partition 
to make room for some Linux.  Linux has gotten pretty good at resizing 
NTFS partitions.  Second, he could download my qemu image of BL3.4, 
install qemu for Windows, boot the BL image and toy around with it to see 
if he could get his program to run on it.  If that works, maybe he'd want 
to install BL3 on his laptop.  DSL is another option for installing a 
reasonably-sized Linux to his laptop.  So far as I know, any distro or OS 
will boot under qemu.  There's a performance hit since hardware is being 
emulated, so the less powerful the host system and the more complex the 
guest system, the worse the performance.  There is a closed-source 
component that makes the qemu run much more quickly, but it's still never 
going to run as fast as on real hardware.

James

PS As I understand it, of all Linuces, Slackware (on which BL is based) is 
closest to the BSD's.