Need some dual-machine advice

Post #61,121 by Ashton 11/5/02 1:18:38 AM Reply	Need some dual-machine advice Have these two 486-133s w/32 MB SIMMs. Can't run no steenkin GUI with That! So.. to get a 486-266 w/64 MB, how do I use the serial ports (or would that get me a 972?) and parallel ports - for the memory? (Or is there a Knoppix Beowulf for 2?) %@Y*#&$ Planned Obsolescence Crap... Landfill time
Post #61,139 by drewk 11/5/02 9:13:47 AM Reply	Toss one of them Seriously. Take the 32MB SIMM from one of them and put it in the other. The performance jump will be far more than you could hope to get from building a mini-cluster. If one of the cases has an open bay, you can even scavange the HD from the donor and set it up as a slave. Heck with 64MB you should be able to run a GUI just fine even on a 486. Go for one of the lighter-weight ones, not Gnome or KDE. === Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #61,163 by Simon_Jester 11/5/02 12:56:23 PM Reply	Nearly the same boat. My 486-100 with 48Megs runs IceWM fine (I've also run twm && fvwm on it without a hitch). Trouble is, now what do I do with it. Originally I had planned to use it as a gateway/DHCP server. But a nice cable router from linksys solved that problem. Then I thought about a samba server. (But I got a 450 Mhz with a much larger harddrive currently doing that).
Post #61,166 by drewk 11/5/02 1:06:12 PM Reply	gene folding you'll be slow, but every cycle [link\|http://folding.stanford.edu\|helps] === Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #61,238 by Arkadiy 11/5/02 6:35:43 PM Reply	nice routers for you and one of your friends will give dial-on-demand on dialup line, or DSL/cable modem router to share internet connection. -- We have only 2 things to worry about: That things will never get back to normal, and that they already have.
Post #61,264 by static 11/5/02 9:17:54 PM Reply	32Mb is fine for a GUI. But you probably don't want to run GNOME or KDE. Or apps like the GIMP. Or Netscape 4.x. My server runs a VNC session for me in 48Mb, with a WindowMaker as my window manager. And I've run X on a 486DX4/100 in 16Mb of RAM, again with WindowMaker. Wade. "Ah. One of the difficult questions."
Post #61,271 by admin 11/5/02 9:38:48 PM Reply	In 1993... I ran SLS Linux with kernel 0.99pl36 (or something like that) on a Zeos laptop (!) with 8M of RAM. And it ran X windows. Regards, -scott anderson "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson..."
Post #61,315 by drewk 11/6/02 8:30:55 AM Reply	Why not? But you probably don't want to run GNOME or KDE. Or apps like the GIMP. Or Netscape 4.x. I do all that on my PII-233 laptop w/32 MB all the time. Oh sure, not all at the same time, but they work. Actuall I run Gnome, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Postgres and Netscape 4.x all at the same time. Plus vi in a couple of terminal windows. === Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #61,537 by static 11/6/02 10:15:27 PM Reply	Well... Netscape 4.x has a reputation for liking lots of memory. And the GIMP certainly will if you load a large enough picture in it. :-) On a PII-233, I suspect GNOME would be fast enough to use. On a 486DX4/100, the lack of speed would probably be evident, notwithstanding how much memory was available. Wade. "Ah. One of the difficult questions."
Post #61,273 by deSitter 11/5/02 9:41:43 PM Reply	Re: Need some dual-machine advice The best possible arrangement here for Linux is: 0) Connect the two machines via a crossover cable and 100bT Ethernet cards (cheap used ones can be had). 1) Set up the main system on one of the machines with a minimal GUI that will rarely be running - this will be the "server". This machine should have the best hard disks. 2) Set up a second system mainly for running X with a full-featured GUI - probably WindowMaker. 3) Configure things to run on the main system but display on the X-system. You can still use the X system for storage but you want the other machine to do all the important stuff (servers and applications). This is one of the main strengths of Linux, that is rarely exploited. You can isolate the GUI on its own machine. In fact the best Linux setup I ever had invovled an X server running on a Windows machine. The Linux machine did not even have a monitor, just a green-screen terminal. -drl
Post #61,287 by static 11/5/02 11:08:08 PM Reply	Alternatively... ... you can make one a terminal server. Then you don't even need a HDD! (But you do need a NIC with a Boot ROM.) [link\|http://www.ltsp.org/\|Linux Terminal Server Project] Wade. "Ah. One of the difficult questions."

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