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From: General Schvantzkoph on 6 Mar 2010 10:31
On Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:15:05 -0500, TJ wrote:

> On 03/06/2010 08:08 AM, General Schvantzkoph wrote:
>
>> I don't understand this mania for trying to run modern software on an
>> antique machine, it's like putting a jet engine on a biplane. Actually
>> that's a poor analogy because Moores law never applied to airplanes, a
>> modern passenger jet is only about 20 times faster then the Wright
>> Flyer whereas a modern PC has 256 times as much memory and is at least
>> that many times faster then the shitbox that the OP is talking about.
>> Even if he gets it to work, which might be possible if he builds a
>> custom kernel for DSL, using the thing is going to be painful. You can
>> can get a netbook, or build a low end desktop, for a couple of hundred
>> bucks. For less money you should be able to find something that's only
>> five or six years old that that will perform decently. A 10 year old
>> machine would have 512M on it, that's enough to run any distro although
>> not very well. You could probably get someone to pay you to take a 10
>> year old machine off their hands, the recycling fee is about $20 so the
>> OP could offer to take the machine away for $10 and both parties would
>> be happy.
>>
> You've never taken on a challenge just to see if you could do it, have
> you?

I've gone trekking in the Himalayas and the Andes if that's what you
mean, but I've never wasted my time on a pointless challenge. Trying to
use a 32M machine for anything more sophisticated then running your lawn
sprinklers is just silly. Even if the OP can get it to work at all the
performance would be absolutely awful.


> I have a 10 year old desktop with 512M, though I admit it didn't come
> that way. It runs Mandriva 2010.0 with KDE 4 just fine. With the nVidia
> FX5500 video card installed, it even runs the KDE 4 eyecandy without
> skipping a beat. OK, so I wouldn't want to do a lot of multitasking, and
> editing a photo with The GIMP could be a painful process. So what? If
> all I want to do, as the OP said *he* wanted to do, is surf the Web, get
> some email, and lurk in newsgroups, the above machine is all I'd need -
> and more. I, for one, would *NOT* "pay the OP to take the machine away."
>
> TJ

I have a 10 year old 512M machine myself, I use it as an ssh server. I'm
running CentOS5.4 in INIT 3. It's completely adequate for that purpose
although if I had a greener state of mind I wouldn't waste the power that
it takes, the right thing to do would be to setup a VM on one of my
modern machines to handle this function, the only reason that I haven't
replaced it with a VM is that I want to see how long this box will run
before it gives up the ghost. However 512M is not 32M, it's 16 times
greater. That factor of 16 is important, it represents the lowest
threshold for a modern desktop. The performance will be lousy but still
tolerable. Personally I wouldn't want to live with something like that as
my desktop, if I was in complete poverty I'd stand outside of a Best Buy
and wait for someone to come by who wanted to recycle their old XP
machine. Best Buy charges you $20 to take it off of you're hands, I'd
offer to do it for nothing. An XP generation machine is likely to have 1G
of RAM and a single core 2G or better processor in it.
From: John Hasler on 6 Mar 2010 10:48
General Schvantzkoph writes:
> I've gone trekking in the Himalayas and the Andes if that's what you
> mean, but I've never wasted my time on a pointless challenge.

What is the "point" in trekking in the Himalayas and the Andes?

> Trying to use a 32M machine for anything more sophisticated then
> running your lawn sprinklers is just silly.

So is walking up and down mountains that you could fly over.

> Even if the OP can get it to work at all the performance would be
> absolutely awful.

As, no doubt, was your performance in the Himalayas compared to that of
the sherpas.
--
John Hasler
jhasler(a)newsguy.com
Dancing Horse Hill
Elmwood, WI USA
From: General Schvantzkoph on 6 Mar 2010 11:44
On Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:48:23 -0600, John Hasler wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph writes:
>> I've gone trekking in the Himalayas and the Andes if that's what you
>> mean, but I've never wasted my time on a pointless challenge.
>
> What is the "point" in trekking in the Himalayas and the Andes?
>
>> Trying to use a 32M machine for anything more sophisticated then
>> running your lawn sprinklers is just silly.
>
> So is walking up and down mountains that you could fly over.
>
>> Even if the OP can get it to work at all the performance would be
>> absolutely awful.
>
> As, no doubt, was your performance in the Himalayas compared to that of
> the sherpas.

If you want to stretch this analogy, the Sherba and Inca guides
functioned like modern quad core/8G machines. At 10,000 ft I was able to
function like a decent late model single core system. At 12,000 feet I
was still at the 1GHz, 1GByte level, at 14,000 I was down to a
500MHz/512M system, i.e. I could function at the very low end of
adequate. When I was in Bolivia I did the equivalent of trying to run
Linux on a 32M system, I walked from 17,000 to 18,000ft. I had to stop
and catch my breath after every few steps, my Bolivian guide was
completely comfortable. I was able to prove to myself that I could
survive at that altitude for a couple of hours but I wasn't able to do
much else, it was the human equivalent of booting DSL. As for Everest, I
saw that from a small airplane, my trying to climb that would be like
trying to run Gnome on a PC/AT with 16K of RAM.
From: Mark Hobley on 6 Mar 2010 12:08
General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
> I don't understand this mania for trying to run modern software on an
> antique machine, it's like putting a jet engine on a biplane.

Not really. A Pentium 120 with 32Mb RAM is perfectly cable of running a
multitasking graphical operating system.

It's only code bloat that makes this impossible. The limitations encountered
are not due to the machine, but due to poor implementation and bloated code.

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley
Linux User: #370818 http://markhobley.yi.org/

From: General Schvantzkoph on 6 Mar 2010 12:58
On Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:08:03 +0000, Mark Hobley wrote:

> General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
>> I don't understand this mania for trying to run modern software on an
>> antique machine, it's like putting a jet engine on a biplane.
>
> Not really. A Pentium 120 with 32Mb RAM is perfectly cable of running a
> multitasking graphical operating system.
>
> It's only code bloat that makes this impossible. The limitations
> encountered are not due to the machine, but due to poor implementation
> and bloated code.
>
> Mark.

I'm not saying it's not theoretically possible to write an OS that can
run like a bat out of hell on a 32M machine, I'm just saying that Linux
in it's current form isn't that OS. Code bloat is a fact of life, there
is a corollary to Parkinson's law which states that code grows to fit the
RAM allotted. At any given time the software available for that
generation's machines was tuned to run fairly comfortably. When I was in
college in the early 70s we had 16 people running on a .25 MIP/256K PDP
11/70. That machine was more responsive then today's 12,000 MIP/12G
iCore7 systems running a single user. Of course we were running line
editors and the only graphics were simple vector graphics games running
on a storage tube display (for you kids out there, storage tubes were
CRTs that used very persistent phosphors, when you drew a lien it would
remain there for a minute or until you erased the entire screen).

Today's code is tuned to modern machines, trying to run it on a 15 year
old system is not going to result in a happy experience.


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