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Date:Mon Mar 14 16:49:01 2001 
Subject:Re: (Still) Off topic 
From:Stephen Isard 
Volume-ID:1010314.01 

jonathan.cunningham@tesco.net wrote:

> I've just acquired a very old Pentium PC (just the box, no monitor,
> keyboard nuffin'). 
snip...
> Any suggestions? (Which Linux? What I don't need to download for
> poplog etc.?)

Hi Jonathan, it's been a long time.

My favorite mini-distribution is mulinux (http://sunsite.dk/mulinux/).
You can actually run it from a single floppy, but you can also clone it
to a hard disk, and there are a bunch of addons that you can download if
you want them to get various web clients and servers and things like
perl and even X.  I run it on a 25MHz 486 with 16Mb of ram, mostly as an
xterminal to a "real" linux machine, but you can actually run it
self-contained with X, and have mail, ftp, lynx, an old version of
Netscape, the lot.  With a pentium processor (wow!) I'll bet it would
really fly.

Another that I've used is Monkey
(http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/monkey/docs/english.htm)
That is bigger to start with, but probably not after you have downloaded
comparable addons.  The main difference for my purposes used to be that
Monkey had a real C compiler while the mulinux one was just a toy, but
the mulinux one now claims to be able to recompile the kernel (not that
I've tried it), so there may no longer be much difference in that
respect.  Also mulinux is actively maintained, with a particularly
helpful mailing list, whereas Monkey doesn't seem to have changed for
several years.  Not that I have anything against stability...

I have recently recompiled poplog to run under both mulinux and Monkey.
Ved works fine in a console window on the 486.  The reason that
recompilation was necessary is that the small distributions tend to use
the older, smaller libc5 runtime libraries, rather than the libc6 ones
that you get with RedHat 6(maybe even 5) onwards.  I had to change two
bits of pop source code, both in $popsrc/unixdefs.ph if I'm remembering
correctly, to get it to work. Since you need a running poplog to remake
the system, I had to mess around with a cross-compiler package for libc5
on a libc6 machine to get a basic libc5 poplog, and then I used that
under Monkey to remake the whole thing.

I'm now in the process of throwing enough stuff away to compress a
usable subset of poplog onto a couple of floppies.  I'm probably not the
best person to be doing this, since I haven't kept up with all the
recent poplog developments, and I don't always know what it is that I'm
throwing away.  Maybe once I've made a start, others will join in and do
it better.  I wasn't going to mention the whole business in public until
I had done it, but since you asked, I couldn't resist. I'd be happy to
give you what I've got at the moment, on the understanding that it is a
very incomplete job.

Steve