From owner-freebsd-chat Tue Aug 3 13: 8:37 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from bytor.rush.net (bytor.rush.net [209.45.245.145]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6D87B14D4E for ; Tue, 3 Aug 1999 13:08:20 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from lynch@bsdunix.net) Received: from localhost (lynch@localhost) by bytor.rush.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id QAA13994; Tue, 3 Aug 1999 16:05:54 -0400 (EDT) Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1999 16:05:54 -0400 (EDT) From: Pat Lynch X-Sender: lynch@bytor.rush.net To: Terry Lambert Cc: David Scheidt , freyes@inch.com, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: BSD lightness: Free/Net/Open In-Reply-To: <199908022013.NAA06953@usr08.primenet.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I haven't been reading the list, but since these are my machines specifically being talked about, I figured I'd expand a little. They are 486dx2/66's , some have DEC ethernet cards, others have 3com (3c509) most have old s3 video cards. some have 8M some have 16M One of the reasons we have gone NetBSD, instead of FreeBSD is very simple, and I don;t know why the debate here. Bill Squier, who is working on these things as sortof his "pet project" is a NetBSD guy, and since he knows what he wants to do with them as X terminals, and was playign around with different things, we went with NetBSD. NetBSD has always focused on being smaller, at least sizewise, to run on older hardware. While freebsd for the most part is more featureful, we don;t need the extra features, we don;t need PicoBSD, and its definitely a preference for Bill to have NetBSD. EVeryone knows I'm a staunch FreeBSD advocate, but in this case I couldn;t come up with any clear advantages to using FreeBSD over NetBSD in this situation. We probably aren't going to be netbooting, and the root filesystemmay or may not be NFS, the server that they are going to use for NFS and managing the windows is probably a FreeBSD box (SMP) and there I do need the advantages of FreeBSD. -Pat ___________________________________________________________________________ Pat Lynch lynch@rush.net lynch@bsdunix.net Systems Administrator Rush Networking ___________________________________________________________________________ On Mon, 2 Aug 1999, Terry Lambert wrote: > > > Also what would me a MINIMUN usable amount of memory to run X. 16MB? > > > These are computers other departments were throwing out so I don't > > > think they have much of a budget to go around upgrading memory. > > > > I ran X on a 16MB P60, with a 512KB video card. Don't forget to > > configure your swap space. It works. There are things like > > occaisonal pauses while the machine swaps. This was running almost > > everyting locally. If you were running things off of a remote > > compute server, i would expect it be much better, expecially if you can > > avoid running things like Netscape. > > I used to run a lab full of AT&T WGS boxes net booted as X terminals. > > They were 386-SX/16's with only 4M of memory each, and 512k of > video RAM. > > This was back in the 1.1.5.1 days, using a stripped kernel and > netboot.exe in a script that gave you the option of Windows 3.11 > or an X terminal at boot time. > > > Terry Lambert > terry@lambert.org > --- > Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present > or previous employers. > > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message