Minimal Amigo onto several small hdd's?
 

Trying to find out if a Minimal Amigo install can be used on some old 486DX's and Pentium I desktop PC's with 3-4 IDE harddrives of 80-120MB each, and 16-32MB RAM. These PC's all have 3.5" fdd's, no CD-ROM's, and no USB cards/ports available.

Have the following Amigo documentation available:
:study:
The Amigo 2.0 package list, http://amigolinux.org/download/Amigo2/Amigo2.0.txt
The Amigo-II-flux package list, http://amigolinux.org/download/others/Amigo-II-flux.txt
The 30MB Crazy 3-Legged install info, http://amigolinux.org/docs/minstall/20MB3leg.htm
The must-read Minmal Install Guide, http://amigolinux.org/docs/minstall/AmigoHOWTO.htm

Do not think that the full Amigo2.0 install will work best with this particular HW setup, and am uncertain whether the 150MB installation options will work when split up onto two small hdd's (e.g., 2 x 80MB each) :(

How does one proceed to best install Amigo using, say, 4 x 80MB hdd's :eek: ??

Usually, on such small hdd's, standard practice is to 1st create a sufficient swap partition so that performance is as maximally enhanced as possible for running a lean XWindows when required. Would definitely follow the Minimal Install Guide recommendations of making this swap partition 16MB or even 24MB .

Q: After booting from the amigo2rc10.img disk and creating the swap partition first, then how should one best format and partition the remaining hard drives' available space (estimate 300MB+) for one of the feasible recommended minimal Amigo installations ?? :Pengy:

Am still reviewing the Minimal Install Guide, and would be glad to contribute to its bottom "Installation Methods" section from any suggestions given here.

Thanks,

-nycace36

There's a good HOWTO for migrating Amigo to regular Linux partitions in the faq.txt
Most of the disk usage is in the /usr directory, so it would be easiest if you had a drive that would hold all that. Otherwise, split /usr/sbin adn /usr/bin onto two drives.
If you had a single hard drive that would hold all of what you want to spread between the drives it would be easier to do.

TY for response.

Yes, you are referring to http://amigolinux.org/docs/faq.txt,
section Q7.

So therefore, the remaining cp -avx directories would presumably go onto the other available 1 or 2 drives that /usr/sbin and /usr/bin do not use, yes?
Basically, PC's as slow as these would probably multitask terribly, and therefore must single-task w/ one app at a time, such as TED/scITE, printing, CLI admin, and perhaps no networking (i.e., minimal ppp or TCP/IP setup) unless there is more diskspace.

Yeah, you might take the largest /usr/bin or /usr/sbin or /usr/X11R6 and put the contents onto one drive. Then remove the contents from the main tree leaving just the folder. Then edit fstab to mount that drive on /usr/(s)bin. Then move the rest of /usr to another drive. Then move the other dirs from /. Just have a look at the sizes after you get the stuff you want in the distro. Then plan accordingly.
You have to have tcp/ip for X to work! You know, X is a server that linux connects to as a client using Internet Protocol.
If you start with the list for a +-40MB install and then add X and fonts-misc, you'll have a total system about 135MB.
Add cxx-libs and fluxbox, use TED, maybe XWC file manager, dillo browser, xpdf. If using ISA cards you may need isapnptools.
You may be able to save space and stay more flexible by using a swapfile instead of a swap partition. Just replace the one in /root with the size you want. See /root/swapfile.txt

Yep, gone through this. Thanks

Big problem turns out to be that many available sub-540MB drives (e.g., the 80MB+ drives mentioned above) keep showing deteriorating sectors w/ fsck surface scans, and are thus unreliable :( . Additionally, no more than two hdd's can be squeezed into these old IBM 486 PS/2's :eek:. Current drives on these PC's are FAT16 (DOS,Win3.1,Win95) and these PC's all run into the old BIOS C/H/S 504MB limit w/o LBA translation, although this FAT16 format is not a problem for Amigo installation.

Would ideally like to upgrade the m-brds on these PS/2's, if they can be inexpensively found for these form-factors (e.g., to support 486DX2 and OverDrive CPU's), and then install Amigo using two or more clean (80< to ~540)MB drives per PS/2. Could then do more than just a bare minimal 135MB install.

IMHO, does not seem worth it at this point for these PS/2's.
Above scenario realistic for the non-PS/2 486's and Pentiums though.

-nycace

Maybe you need Basiclinux (based on Slack 3.5):

http://www.icewalkers.com/Linux/Soft...asicLinux.html

I have installed it on an old ancient 386 computer with 4 MB RAM. Yes, it works. Even multitasking, but it's slow. Good network capabilities too.

Good luck!