Distributions - was Re: [plug] Red Hat 7

[Matt Kemner]

On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, Bret Busby wrote:

> Anne works in Perth, during the daytime.

Is she able to swing past Hilton on her way home one night?
(corner South St and Carrington St)
 
> The problem is that, in a 486, the controller for the CD Drive, is
> required to be a soundcard based one,

Why?
being a 486 it has at least one IDE interface, right?
One IDE interface can handle 2 devices - a master and a slave
so you set the HDD up as master, the CDROM up as slave and plug them both
into the IDE interface.

> not PCI. The CD ROM controller is not part of the IDE controller card.

Only if the CDROM is not a normal IDE CDROM

> We got a soundcard, to try to operate the CD, but it doesn't work.

That might be because 
a) the sound card has an interface for a non-IDE cdrom and the CDROM is
   IDE
b) The sound card has an interface for a non-IDE cdrom and the CDROM is
   non-IDE but there either isn't an appropriate driver in the Linux
   Kernel for that CDROM interface or you haven't loaded it with
   the right parameters.

> Probably, put some stuff on it, like GNOME, Netscape, gcc, g77, Anne
> might want flex and bison ( I think that's the yacc one), etc. 

800MB should be sufficient
Netscape is going to amazingly slow on a 486 though.
Gnome might be a trifle slow too.
You might want to try out Windowmaker and Enlightenment while you're at
it.

 - Matt