Dear All,

Let's make the long story short.

- A PC with 100 MHz Pentium 1, 32 Mbyte RAM, HP Travan tape, Toshiba XM-5302TA CD-ROM, Trio 64+ display adapter (memory capacity unknown, I found the board among garbage.)

- I have a Mandrake 10.1 Discovery and Red Hat 5.2 distributions.

I have installed the Mandrake package, without the Office functionality and so on. I use the kernel 2.4.27 because I cannot get the 2.6 kernel work together my Toshiba XM-5302TA CD-ROM.

Some 10.1 features presuppose 2.6 kernel so .......

I have a dream about a back-up machine but the 2.4 kernel claims that I have a hard disk with 64 heads instead of a tape drive. I do have two old Quantum Fireballs - 1080 and 1280 unformatted.

Questions: (Please observe that I know nothing about computers and SW!)

1. Is it possible to have one "logical" mount that spans over two physical drives? That is, / partly on hda and partly on hdc? (The system has decided that my tape drive shall be named as hdb.) Some problems with partitions are obvious, it is possible to write the partition table but not format.

2. All attempts to start KDE have resulted to a system crash. Everything that I have tried from the command line interpreter has worked OK but I'm using only one hard disk. Only / and swap, no other partitions. I only need to start some kind of a browser to log on to router and smb machines. Is there an alternative to KDE that seems to consume all the available memory.

Yours Very Truly,
P_Ko

Well as far as the KDE problem goes, I like to use Xfce. Some like fluxbox, some like blackbox. And alot of others exist. Just do a google search and look up what you like the best. Those listed above are nice lightweight Window Managers that don't consume as near as much memory as KDE.

-onelung

What you can do is has / in a partition and /etc or /home or /usr or /boot /opt in another

I don't think you'll be able to start KDE. try a lighter window manager like Window Maker.
Also, there are console web browsers for linux like lynx.

32Megs is very, very little RAM for X & any modern(ish) window manager, IMO.
Even if you can get the gui up, the range of applications you can run will be quite limited.

You can run TWM, FVWM, or even FVWM2 with 32MB of RAM. Heck, I used to run FVWM in 4MB of RAM with 8MB of swap, and it was quite painful, but it did run. It ran quite a bit better when RAM prices came down and I could afford 24MB - a huge amount of RAM for the time. If you dedicate enough swap, you can run whatever you want - just don't expect it to be fast and learn to be patient while Linux SwapSwapSwapSwapSwapSwaps your data back and forth.