Re: tlug: Aptiva 520 - 486 DX

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Q <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> On Sun, 21 Nov 1999, Tony Laszlo wrote:

    >> ISSHO (Tokyo-based non-profit) is about to receive a badly
    >> needed donation of a computer.  It is an IBM Aptiva 520 with a
    >> 486 DX CPU (100Mhz), 540M hard disk and 32M of ram - I hear it
    >> really

Cool!  I second everything Jonathan said, except that I really
wouldn't trust that an arbitrary drive will plug directly into the
machine.  If it's an all-in-one box, like notebooks they often have
special harnesses or interfaces; you may need special tools to get at
the components safely.  No worry about voiding warranty, of course,
but you may have to worry about voiding the circuitry itself.

It should be OK, but it would be worth checking first.  If it's a
tower case with separate monitor, you should have no trouble.

    >> I'm wondering what distribution of Linux (preferably Japanese
    >> localized) could be installed and run well on that machine?

    jb> Any one would work.  There's Vine Linux, TurboLinux, Red
    jb> Hat-J, Laser 5 Linux, Debian (don't know if this is localized
    jb> per se, or just J-enabled.  Steve?), and maybe some others
    jb> that don't spring to mind right off hand.

Debian is easy enough to install Japanese stuff for, but there's no
"virtual" Japanese package you can select to have a turnkey Japanese
system.  You've used TL, Tony, unless you have specific reason to want 
to do something different I'd say stay with it.  Just deselect all of
the "modern" GUI tools, KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment, and that ilk.

If you have trouble getting that to work, start with one of the
minimal configurations and build up from there.  This may be easier
with Debian, but I haven't tried recently and Debian has bloated a lot 
in the last year or so.

    >> Does anyone have any success (or horror stories) of running
    >> Linux on a similar machine?

My workhorse 1992--1999 (SCSI host RIP) was a 486DX-50 EISA box with
only 16MB of RAM until early 1998 (until then it doubled as my main
workstation and was running X, too).  I double-booted Slackware from
about mid '94, moved easily to Debian only in mid-1996, and it had
been running Debian ever since.

    jb> Linux will run just find on a 486-100, which is fine for a
    jb> low-end server like you envision.  You might want to add some
    jb> memory, though.  Linux does a lot with 32 meg (don't run X all
    jb> the time, though), but if use it up and start paging,
    jb> performance takes a major hit.

I did have the advantage of SCSI, a 4MB cache on the SCSI host.  But
still, it wasn't that much better.  Did fine through the Jan 17--25,
1995 period when it was taking up to 50,000 web hits a day IIRC.
Also, if you run X in basic XGA mode (1024x768x256), it doesn't take
up all that much memory, and you may be able to use a smaller X server
than the fully accelerated ones.

-- 
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