From: hedrick@dumas.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: Running Linux: What Machines?
Date: 23 Jul 92 17:57:53 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.

mwalker@novell.com (Mel Walker) writes:

>What is the minimum configuration to reasonably run Linux? I don't mean the
>bare bones minimum. If it can run under 4Meg, but really needs 8, tell me
>8. What graphics cards does it support? What HDs? etc. Does GNU emacs run
>on it? Is it a full/complete un*x, whatever that means? I would really like
>my un*x-clone to hack around with, but I need to know how much I'm going to
>have to spend on PC equipment. Right now I only have a Mac, so I'll be
>starting from scratch.

Unfortunately it depends upon what you want to do.  I've got a
386sx/16 with 4MB.  If you're willing to wait for large compiles,
that's fine for traditional Unix work with a single user.  From other
reports here, I'd say that anything less than 4MB is a serious
problem.  More than 4MB would probably help.  Certainly multiuser work
would need more.  (I do use several virtual screens at once.)  However
I'm about to upgrade to a 486/33 with 16MB.  My current system isn't
enough to give pleasant results with X.  It works, but scrolling is so
slow that I find I prefer not to use X.  Probably a 486/33 is more
than I need, but I've gotten tired of having to upgrade my system a
lot.  Since the 486/33 isn't that expensive, I thought it would be
cheaper in the long run.  I use 128MB of disk space.  I actually have
a 512MB disk, but keep Linux usage to 128MB to avoid making backup a
big problem.  (I back up by doing tar through mtools into a DOS file.
Then under DOS I save it on a Colorado Memory Systems tape drive.
This is the only thing I use DOS for now.)  128MB is enough to keep a
couple of copies of kernel source and source to a few big packages.
It might not be enough if I wanted to recompile all the X softwre.
(Note that X from a user point of view isn't so bad.  As I recall, a
reasonable set of things can be done in 10MB, and the minimum is like
5.5MB.)  You can certainly do reasonable things with less than 128MB.
At one point I had a 40MB disk.  Even that was enough to have a
reasonable set of utilities and the kernel source, though I'd guess a
real hacker would find it frustrating fairly quickly.

Although SCSI support is there, unless there's a strong reason to use
it I recommend an IDE disk.  Perhaps that's short-sighted.  SCSI will
have the advantage of supporting tape drives, and I'm not sure I see
much sign of other tape drive support.  (I have a cheap non-SCSI tape
drive, and can use it only under DOS.)  I recommend an ET4000-based
VGA card, in case you want to run X.  Other cards will work, but that
seems to be the recommended type.  As far as specific cards, things
are very frustrating.  It's clear what you want: 1MB of memory, with
fast clocks whose speeds are fixed (i.e. don't depends upon arcane
things you can only do in DOS).  Unfortunately we've found that
vendors can't tell you what chip set their boards use, much less what
they clock speeds are.  Obviously somebody in their organization can,
but for an end user to get this out of a store can be hard.  I asked
my local computer store to pick an ET4000-based VGA controller for me.
They got me a Cardinal 700.  It actually seems to be reasonable.
ET4000, with clocks up to 90MHz (which are fine for any monitor I
would use).  However my local computer store seems to do a better job
than most.  It used to be that people recommended Diamond Speed Star,
but it looks like new models of it have become more arcane.  So at
this point I don't know what to say.  We're going through this at
Rutgers, and there I need a somewhat faster card, since we have a
1280x1024 monitor.  I've looked at vga.dbase, but it only lists the
first 8 clocks, so it seems that you can't tell how fast a card is
from that.  Recommending VGA cards seems to have become a real
problem.

Given the current suit against BSDI, I am reluctant to answer whether
Linux is Unix.  I'm a SunOS system programmer, and I don't find
anything seriously missing.  Like SunOS, Ultrix, and other major
systems, it takes features from both the ATT and BSD camp.  The base
kernel is POSIX, as you'd expect with any new system.  This is rather
close to System V, though without some System V features.  Major
omissions are kernel support for networking (though that is being
worked on) and System V specific features like IPC, their version of
memory mapping, etc.  I think everyone agrees the networking is
essential.  However for someone at home who doesn't have their own
Ethernet, it may not be such a big deal.  KA9Q will let you do telnet,
ftp, and X over SLIP (dialup IP).  Linux is based on Gnu utilities,
compilers, and libraries.  They are intended to be POSIX-compatible,
but have lots of BSD-flavored extensions.  Because this is one of the
first systems to be POSIX-compatible from the start, there are some
problems with older code.  ANSI C and POSIX header files don't always
work well with code written for K&R.  Newer software seems OK.  I'm
not pleased with these incompatibilities (though the code I work with
isn't bothered very much), but I think all vendors are moving in the
same direction.  For someone who wants to get experience with Un...
errr... whatever, I think an ANSI/POSIX system is the right thing.
There's a huge amount of software ported, given that the system
has been usable for only a few months.  I'm really quite pleased.
In some ways I might prefer 386/BSD when it's stable, since I'm
really a BSD fan.  But there's a lot to be said for Linux' design
choices, and I'm not in a hurry to move.
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux