Running Under Windows

[Duane Clark]

Tom Hubin wrote:
> 
> ...
> 
> I guess the next step is to go ahead and partition my drive and install
> one of the Linux's then Wine. I have Mandrake 6.5 purchased with
> documentation. I have Mandrake 8.0 Beta 2 on CDs without printed
> documentation. Is there a particular brand of Linux or Wine that you
> recommend?
> 
> The reason for Windows 3.1 right now is that my laptop is an 80486 50MHz
> with 350MB drive, 20MB RAM, 1.44MB diskette, no CD drive. My desktop is
> a Pentium with CD and several GB of disk. But it is the laptop on the
> boat. And I do want to make changes and compile while on the boat. If I
> cannot compile and run on my 486 please tell me now. I will eventually
> get a newer 32 bit laptop but not this month. Nothing leftover after
> taxes.

Just my opinions. I think the most difficult part here will be the RAM,
but it might be worth trying. I have Redhat 6.2 installed on a 486/33
laptop with 20MB of RAM and a 220MB harddisk. Linux and X Windows run
fine, but a couple of X apps along with Linux and X quickly eats up the
20MB of RAM, and I have not attempted to run wine on it. X windows is a
moderate memory user, and wine adds to that load significantly. Between
the wine server and a simple wine app on my desktop machine, they appear
to use somewhere in the neighborhood of 20MB themselves. It is possible
that stripping the binaries (which removes debug information from them)
would reduce that somewhat, though I really don't know.

If you exceed the installed memory, Linux will transparently swap
portions of the code between memory and the harddisk. But there will be
a significant pause when this happens, as the harddisk is much slower
than memory. If you can at least add a little more memory, then it is
more likely to work reasonably well. When compiling, you might want to
exit X windows and do that from the command line, and then restart X
windows to run the application. That is all pretty easy to do.

For installation without a CDROM drive, I used a PLIP connection (a
"null" or "Laplink" parallel port cable, about $7) between a desktop
running Linux, and the laptop. The procedure will be specific to the
distribution, but Mandrake will most likely have a boot floppy available
with a PLIP driver. It will require a minimal install on a 350 MB disk,
but the necessary pieces should fit. My Redhat 6.2/XFree86 installation
(no compiler or wine) uses just under 150MB.

Duane