[plug] small install (was: Installing Debian)

[Leon Brooks]

Simon Scott (SSC) wrote:

> A friend has a small project to setup some P90s for a small school which
> teaches underpriveleged kids (or something, didnt get the details). He was
> talking about making a minimal install of linux, and wanted to know just how
> small he could get it.

> I suppose with a server which is half decent he could get away with a local
> swap.

> Altho Im still not sure P90s will run KDE 2 at any great rate of knots :)
> But if they really want to teach kids about 'computing' rather than MS I
> guess Linux is the way to go.

Your big problem will be finding enough 72-pin RAM to run anything 
significant by way of a GUI application. Looking at 16MB per machine to 
be at all useful, and double that would be good.

You wouldn't use KDE2, but something *much* lighter, for a standalone 
like this.

If you could afford *one* decent modern server with heaps of RAM and 
disk, this would help lots since the apps would live and run on the 
server and share a lot of their RAM, and the workstations could NFS 
mount the user's home directory from the server onto the workstatio, 
meaning that the workstations would only need to deal with X and KDE 
itself, and store neither apps nor user data, a much more credible deal.

Cheers