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Message from Steven
===================
Sindi wrote:
>
> The people I am putting this together for 
> will come back to me if they need any other 
> applications.  They don't always have a spare 
> partition or want to risk shrinking their FAT32 
> partition so I want something that fits in a 
> 50MB loop file, or at least in 100MB.  

The BL3 foundation plus Opera 9.21 is 28mb.  
Opera 8 is smaller.

> Lots of people just want a browser and email 
> and a wordprocessor that prints.  

Opera + AbiWord will fit into 50mb, but they
both can generate a lot of files.  100mb is
probably about right.

If I were doing a fool-proof system for a naive
user, I would use a ramdisk for the root filesystem.
It would be a minimal root filesystem.  X and all
the applications would be on a different filesystem
(loop or partition) that is checked (e2fsck) and
then mounted at /usr.  X is auto-executed and all
the available applications are in the jwm menu.
Exiting jwm reboots the system.

When the user gets into trouble (which will no doubt
happen), he simply resets the machine and gets a nice
clean ramdisk and an automatic fsck for his files.

The ramdisk filesystem is limited and volatile so 
something will need to be done about /tmp and /home 
(and any other directories that accumulate files).
Separate filesystems could be used for /tmp and /home
or you could simply symlink them into the /usr filesystem
( /usr/tmp  /usr/home ).

> A friend's student thinks he needs a faster computer 
> for the internet so I offered to make his faster.

Is he on dial-up?  If so, his slowness is not caused
by the computer.  If he's on broadband, you may be able
to speed things up for him, but you'd better leave plenty
of room for the stuff he downloads.  At broadband speed
he's going to accumulate many many megabytes.

Cheers,
Steven