Re: New distro

On Mon, 14 May 2007, in the Usenet newsgroup alt.os.linux, in article
<f294v4$2t8v$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, PTM wrote:

I have never made a distro and don't have time for it. Still I see there
might be space for one:

SAILORS LINUX.

Not sure why you'd name it that, but what-ever

- Built for CF mass storage, no moving HD
- No swap partitions.
- SIMPLE USB HD and stick mount.
- low speed processor
- low memory consumption, should work in 128 MB

Excuuuuuussee Me - get rid of the windoze-wannabe desktop.

[mro ~]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 30824 30116 708 25476 1808 8644
-/+ buffers/cache: 19664 11160
Swap: 36284 14256 22028
[mro ~]$

Thirty-two Megs of RAM - running X, but with a light-weight desktop (FVWM)
with about twenty users.

[gatekeeper /]$ free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 6876 3448 3228 2128 772 1504
-/+ buffers/cache: 1172 5704
Swap: 8188 4059 4129
[gatekeeper /]$

Eight Megs - command line only

- low power consumption

Last I looked, 'gatekeeper' is drawing about 16 VA including a small disk.

- no multimedia or CD rippers or burners

Waazzat?

- no large officeprograms

[gatekeeper /]$ which vi
/bin/vi
[gatekeeper /]$

- wlan network,
- Samba by default with simple client programs (not Thunar)
- optimized for charts, USB and RS232 NMEA, GPS and AIS
- GPSDrive or downscaled Xastir

That will cost a little RAM and power - within reason

- Ripping package manager shaves out MAN, DOC and HTMl pages of programs
to fit in a small mass storage.

I forget what Tom Oehser used to get the man pages down, but recall that
tomsrtbt fits onto ONE _severely_ overstuffed (1.72 Megs) 3.5 inch floppy.

Please remember that the reason the modern "popular" distributions want
a 800+ MHz Pentium, 512 Megs of RAM and a 25 Gig hard drive is that the
GUI desktop eats RAM. CPU cycles, and diskspace like a teen-ager inhales
hamburgers. Toss the "featured" desktop, and you can MORE THAN cut the
system requirements in half. Look at all of the eye-candy you have now
running on your desktop, and ask yourself if you really need all that.
There really are light-weight desktops that don't need 96 Megs for the
splash screen and "plain" wallpaper.

Old guy
.

Relevant Pages

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