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Thread ID: 31964	2003-04-05 11:57:00	Is this realistic, or am i pushing the preverbial uphill with a soft toothpick?	Clueless (181)	Press F1

Post ID	Timestamp	Content	User
133628	2003-04-05 11:57:00	I have just resently aquired a once "state of the art" 1995 pentuim 166 comp with an amazing 128 meg of Ram in it . I have alo aquired a removabale front loading HDD bay, the kind that allows one to run a guest HDD disk on a computer . What i though might be a good idea is finding a nice Linux distribution so that i can have a computer whose only function is to provide my network with a easy place to connect HDDs that i then suck dry . . er i mean back up before reformatt or whatever . Keep in mind that command lines still seem a bit unusual, but nowhere near as scary as they did a few months back, A cheesy light GUI would be nice, but i would like to be able to install things as lightly as possible, with my limited expertise . O yeah . . It must be able to handle NTFS . Any suggestions??? Clueless	Clueless (181)
133629	2003-04-05 12:09:00	Howdy Clueless, A P1/166 with 128Mb RAM is capable of running SuSE 8.0 The limiting factor would be your hard drive. You need about 1.5 to 2.0Gb hard drive to load a full install including KDE desktop. HTH	Gorela (901)
133630	2003-04-05 12:35:00	Really????? Sometimes poor old Sam has a bit of a moan about how much i make the poor slug do, (sorry Sam) so i never thought i'd be able to run SuSE on a P166! HDD space will depend on what i can scavenge before that one happens. The drive in the box doesn't want to play anymore. What about NTFS? i was having a look round the net, and while there seems to be a bit of experermentation, nothing seems to be at the well tried and proven stable stage. BTW, the threads title was supposed to read "or am i pushing the preverbial uphill with a soft toothpick?" .Clueless	Clueless (181)
133631	2003-04-05 12:53:00	Most linux distros will read NTFS, but no allow you to alter it. There is a program that is currently in beta that may allow more manipulation of NTFS. Sadly I can't remember what it's called at the moment though. :8] You need to ensure that the amount of swap is at least twice the amount of RAM. I had realised what your heading was getting at :)	Gorela (901)
133632	2003-04-05 13:11:00	If you're tight on hard disk space, install Slackware or Debian . I have an installation of Slack 9 . 0 on my webserver . It has Apache, PHP and MySQL and it also has all the compilation tools (gcc, automake, autoconf, etc) . The install comes to about 350mb . (No gui of course ;-)) . I could cut that down considerably if I removed the development tools . > What about NTFS? i was having a look round the net, > and while there seems to be a bit of > experermentation, nothing seems to be at the well > tried and proven stable stage . I'm sure this has been mentioned before - at the moment, you can read NTFS partitions . There is experimental writing out there but its horrible and you need to scandisk your NTFS partition once you write to the partition so that it doesn't corrupt itself . But if you want to destroy an NTFS partition, I'm sure there is something around to do that :D	segfault (655)
133633	2003-04-05 13:15:00	For what i'm expecting to be doing here reading and/or reformatting NTFS will probably be all that matters . I currently have a 20 gig "guest" HDD hanging from from what was Sams CDrom cable . The drive is mounted, it has "0 items - 0 files - 0 Directories" but reported free space of 5 . 2 gig/20gig seems alot of used drive for "0 - 0 - 0" . Obviously on Sam, SuSE8 has a little trouble reading this file system in a way that is actually useful . I'm off to bed . I'm sure there is something very simple that I may have totally overlooked, but i'm too tired now to spot the obvious . Thanks to all . Clueless	Clueless (181)
133634	2003-04-06 02:35:00	Ive run RedHat 8.0 with a download (4ish megs) of a Window manager called XFCE! This ran like a dream on a P166 with 32MB RAM! You can download an NTFS plugin (very small) and it'll let you read it, but other than that, they call writing to NTFS 'Experimental' and to 'use at your own risk'. You may be best off using a Win98 boot disk to format the drive, although any MS OS that can handle NTFS allows you to format the partitions at the start, so that should be fine! Hope this helps Chilling_Silence BTW - XFCE is an rpm, so Im not sure if SuSE supports rpms (think it does) but you can use it with SuSE. I did a Linux installation with RH 8 on a 1.6 gig HDD and got it down to approx 1.01 gigs!	Chilling_Silence (9)
133635	2003-04-06 03:47:00	I've got a Slackware installation on a 40 MB disk (6 MB ram 386SX20). There's a mini installation which will fit in a 10 MB directory in a DOS system. :D (Those are probably so old that they wouldn't take that NTFS file system sofware). What takes up all the room is applications, and GUI rubbish. Slackware would probably be the way to go. It lets you install the minimum software. The few commands you will need to do this are DOS-like enough that you don't need a GUI. Or development files. Or 35 clever scripting interpreters. Or Open Office. Or ... If you use RH, kudzu (sort of Plug + Play) would probably detect the plug in drive if it was there at boot time. I turned off kudzu, when I decided that I don't like the system changing itself. You should be able to just mount the disk manually (never have such a disk auto mounting). You could have an /etc/ fstab entry with options "-t auto -o ro", so you just type "mount <foreigndisk>". I suspect you could do this with Windows without too much trouble, so it should be a doddle with Linux.. ]:)	Graham L (2)
133636	2003-04-06 03:48:00	I've got a Slackware installation on a 40 MB disk (6 MB ram 386SX20). There's a mini installation which will fit in a 10 MB directory in a DOS system. :D (Those are probably so old that they wouldn't take that NTFS file system sofware). What takes up all the room is applications, and GUI rubbish. Slackware would probably be the way to go. It lets you install the minimum software. The few commands you will need to do this are DOS-like enough that you don't need a GUI. Or development files. Or 35 clever scripting interpreters. Or Open Office. Or ... If you use RH, kudzu (sort of Plug + Play) would probably detect the plug in drive if it was there at boot time. I turned off kudzu, when I decided that I don't like the system changing itself. You should be able to just mount the disk manually (never have such a disk auto mounting). You could have an /etc/ fstab entry with options "-t auto -o ro", so you just type "mount <foreigndisk>". I suspect you could do this with Windows without too much trouble, so it should be a doddle with Linux.. ]:)	Graham L (2)
133637	2003-04-06 03:58:00	There is a 2 Disk Distro available.... runs from 2 Disks (Go figure) and its pretty minimal... Graham :> What does that command do? Mounting the drive wouldnt be a prob reall :-) Dunno what it'd show up as... /dev/hdb1?	Chilling_Silence (9)
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