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SubjectRe: Memory Rusting Effect [re: Linux hostile to poverty]
Date
>> Windows have been there, done that. And people decided they didn't like
>> it and went to Linux. History repeats?
>
>Raising the bar has to be done. Windows issn't so much about raising the
>bar, as of doing it _badly_ (and excessively, in the case of WinNT).
>
>Just face facts: if you have a machine from 1985, why do you expect to
>have an OS from 1998? If you can make do with an older machine, you can
>make do with Linux-1.2 or Linux-2.0 (and people _do_).
>
> Linus
>

Problem is that Linux usually gets the slowest machine thats unusable for
anything else and nowadays that still may be 8 MB of RAM if not 4 MB. In
several companies that I have done some work for anything with 16 MB and a
486DX4-133 or higher virtually automatically gets reused as a Win95
workstation. The remainder is available for "other" projects. So far I
have been able to use these machines for mail servers, network storage
(samba or NFS), web servers, backup servers, communication servers,
bootp/DHCP servers, terminal servers, etc. And these systems, from time to
time, may need drivers, features, and security (and other) patches only
available on the latest kernels. Because of the constricted resources I
usually make each single purpose machines but this is ok as well. 2.0.x
runs quite well in 8 MB and acceptably in 4 MB if not running resource
intensive programs and unnecessary programs such as sendmail. What new
features will cause 2.2 to need 16 MB when 2.0 ran fine in 8 MB? After all
this is just the kernel not the entire system. Perhaps some of these
features could be modularized so that they could be excluded, if unneeded,
from kernels built for low memory machines. By the way some of these
machine cannot even be upgraded beyond 8 MB of memory as they usually use 30
pin SIMMs and they only have 8 SIMM slots. Furthermore buying 4 MB 30 pin
SIMMs are not cost effective, if findable at all, and are rarely found in
older machines.

>
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