From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Sep 10 8:28: 2 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from maile.telia.com (maile.telia.com [194.22.190.16]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AF13837B405 for ; Mon, 10 Sep 2001 08:27:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from d1o913.telia.com (d1o913.telia.com [195.252.44.241]) by maile.telia.com (8.11.2/8.11.0) with ESMTP id f8AFRrZ27882 for ; Mon, 10 Sep 2001 17:27:53 +0200 (CEST) Received: from ertr1013.student.uu.se (h185n2fls20o913.telia.com [212.181.163.185]) by d1o913.telia.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id RAA16614 for ; Mon, 10 Sep 2001 17:27:50 +0200 (CEST) Received: (qmail 98080 invoked by uid 1001); 10 Sep 2001 15:27:49 -0000 Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 17:27:49 +0200 From: Erik Trulsson To: midiostri@in.gr Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 486 Message-ID: <20010910172749.A97982@student.uu.se> Mail-Followup-To: midiostri@in.gr, questions@freebsd.org References: <8f6d01c13a01$c1f59500$0a05030a@internal.ramnet.gr> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <8f6d01c13a01$c1f59500$0a05030a@internal.ramnet.gr> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.21i Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 05:06:16PM +0300, midiostri@in.gr wrote: > Hi, > > I have an old 486 DX2, 8 Mb RAM, 80 Mb hard disk. > It runs Windows 3.1 > > I'm thinking of converting it to FreeBSD but lot's of questions arise.. > For example, should i use the latest version or some older one? The newer FreeBSD versions (from 3.4 (or maybe 3.3) onwards) require more than 8 MB RAM to install. So to install FreeBSD you would either have to get more memory or install an older version. (You can run the newer versions with only 8 MB RAM but not install.) > And is there any chance to run Xserver on it? > > As u understand, I'd like to keep it graphical --together with some > descent, graphical applications (internet browser, text processor and > the like..)-- You won't be able to fit FreeBSD + X + Webbrowser on the disk. FreeBSD itself needs about 100 MB for a semi-complete installation. To get X + some applications also I don't think you can get away with less than 200 MB disk. I wouldn't recommend running with less than 500MB to have some space for your own documents and some spare space. Also, with only 8 MB RAM things will be slow. You can run X + Netscape on 8 MB RAM (I have done it) but it will be slow. Very slow. When running graphical applications I wouldn't recommend anything less than 32MB. More is nicer. To sum it up: If you want to install FreeBSD on that computer and use it as a general purpose machine (as opposed to a machine that only does one thing, for example runs a firewall) you need to get a bigger disk. (Hard disks are dirt cheap today so that shouldn't be a big problem.) If you want to run graphical applications and don't want unacceptably slow performance you also need to increase the amount of RAM. At least to 16 MB and preferably to 32MB or more. (Memory is not quite as cheap as disk, especially not for an older machine like this which probably uses 72-pin or maybe even 30-pin SIMMs.) -- Erik Trulsson ertr1013@student.uu.se To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message