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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: BasicLinux List <baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Cc: paul makinen <pmakinen_20712 AT yahoo.com>
  • Subject: Re: [BL] Upgrading BL3
  • Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 23:51:50 +0000 (UTC)

On Tue, 25 Apr 2006, James Miller wrote:

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

I suggested that but he is afraid to mess up Windows. Maybe he can add another hard drive instead, but he prefers to use the laptop for astronomy.

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

Is it a free download?

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.

I will forward this info, thanks. I already forwarded David's description of how to install qemu to BL3.


James

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

I recommended Slackware and BL to him. He was astonished to hear BL is a 2MB download and comes with X and a window manager (but Xvesa tends not to work on laptop videos).
Sindi




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