[plug] Old 486 advice

[Adrian Woodley]

> Blackbox is an alternative, but not one I've tried personally. Some 
> rave about it. 


Yeah, I've used Blackbox and I rave about it! Its a very good, lean 
interface, provided you don't mind it being a little unintelligent when 
it comes to window placement and remembering things. Its easy to use, 
fairly easy to configure and extremely lightweight - using no loaded 
images at all. There are a couple of nice applets for it to display 
memory usage, load, etc and depending on which theme you choose, it 
looks quit nice. It also makes very good use of desktop space, something 
you will notice on a 486 where you'll be lucky to run at 800x600

>> which kernel version would peopel sugest?
>>
> Your choice really. 2.2 comes with debian potato, and it doesn't like 
> being upgraded to 2.4 much (you need to install your own modutils, etc 
> - ick). If you go with debian, you can move to woody (the testing 
> version, pretty stable since debian-testing tends to equate with 
> everyone else's releases) and use a 2.4 kernel if you need netfilter 
> etc. Of course netfilter uses more RAM because of its stateful 
> connection tracking...

Theres a top bloke by the name of Adrian Bunk who's kindly provided a 
set of 2.4 packages for potato allowing it to be upgraded fairly safely 
and easily to a 2.4 kernel. I've had very good expiriences with this and 
would like to take the opportunity to publicly prase Adrian on his top 
effort.

Although this will be over your head if you're new to debian, you need 
to add the line "deb http://people.debian.org/~bunk/debian potato main" 
to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. After that, the bunk packages will 
be included everytime you add/remove/update your packages.

Regards,
Adrian Woodley