I could well believe that Vista would struggle on anything less
than a Cray, but Linux isn't *that* demanding is it?

I had a look at the T22 specs and they seem pretty respectable to
me, at least compared to some of the systems I have Linux running
on (eg 64MB, 266MHz Pentium MMX).

And BSD is still running fine on my 48MB, 66MHz 486dx (although admitedly
its not so good for running netscape or heavy crypto).

Of course it might be different if I were trying to run full blown
KDE or GNOME, but you can't really blame the operating system for that.
(though a T22 looks like it would be able to handle it if necessary)

I do find I tend to need a lot more HDD capacity than comes as
standard on older machines when running a Unix variant. But even
my old 486 was upgradeable from the original 122MB hard drive to a
pair of 40GB drives, so it isn't usually a problem.

Personally I think there is a lot to be said for doing development on
modest spec'd machines, unless (like Microsoft) you have a vested
interest in generating a need for hardware upgrades...

Anyway - I found an old Thinkpad 600 in my junk box. Anyone know
if that would make a useable Plan9 machine?

last week i added 1gb RAM to my previously 512mbyte lenovo (3000 N100) to stop
the linux system from thrashing. all i run directly is firefox and drawterm.
the system was fine at 512mbyte until a few weeks ago (when more updates
arrived).

i could probably have got by with `only' 256mbyte or 512mbyte more but the
bigger memory card was hardly more expensive.

it should be fine.

On Mon Jun 9 11:33:19 EDT 2008, digbyt@acm.org wrote:

well the first thing most people run on linux is firefox, flash and
acrobat. those three horsemen of the apocalypse bring my pIII/256mb
machine to its knees.

Who needs firefox having abaco ;)

In fact I think linux has become more and more bloa... I mean resource
demanding lately.
Some years ago I had a 100MHz IBM (Cyrix?) 8MiB ram machine that made
marvels for me...
It is impressive what we did with so "little"... 3d modelling, raytracing...
What did get so wrong that now people are willing to pay for a 1GiB
ram minimum resource predator?

Anyway... Someone told me that Toshiba Libretto C70 works good with
plan 9... plus it is "VHS" sized.
(I think that floppy is a little tricky... I'll have to ask)

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 10:49 AM, erik quanstrom coraid.com> wrote:

On Mon Jun 9 12:14:50 EDT 2008, lorenzobivens@gmail.com wrote:

anyone who wishes to access a site depending on javascript.

- erik

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 8:30 AM, Digby Tarvin acm.org> wrote:

Linux is an utter porker. ubuntu on my T23 is really awful, I fixed it
by turning most of it off.

They've fallen into the layers of abstraction trap, achieved more and
more with the ever popular initialized structures (by ld of course)
that point this way, that way, and every way. I had the fun experience
recently of tracking a write system call via nfs3. Impressive that it
works, impressive in its complexity, depressing in most ways.

Just look at the OLPC stuff. Linux and Sugar environment now make XP
look fast. Now that's a sad comment.

Besides, most crays nowadays are made of opterons that run slower than
your laptop :-)

ron

On Mon, 2008-06-09 at 16:45 +0100, Charles Forsyth wrote:

Since we're on the subject of memory hogs: does anybody know a way for
querying Linux or Solaris (or any OS for that matter) of what the
*physical* pages correspond to and how many virtual pages (and in which
processes) they map into. The only utility that comes close is memstat:
http://www.fifi.org/cgi-bin/man2html/usr/share/man/man1/memstat.1.gz
but I don't quite believe its output, since it relies on the second
hand information available from /proc/*/map and a really awkward mapping
process.

I don't think the virtual to physical mapping provides as much
insight into memory usage as you might think...

My understanding of the way it works in Linux (in the default
Intel configuration) is that the 4GB virtual address space is split
into 2 areas, the upper 1GB being a direct mapping to the first
GB of physical memory, minus a small range of virtual address used
as a window to access any physical memory in excess of 1GB (hence
the distinction between high and low memory in the kernel).

The lower 3GB of virtual address space is available for the currently
running process, and is configured according to /proc//maps

Working out how your physical memory is currently being used seems
to involve quite a few kernel data structures. I don't know of any
utility that collates it all into anything other than general
statistics. It would be an interesting thing to look at if anyone
knows of one.

Regards,
DigbyT

On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 05:08:06PM -0700, Roman Shaposhnik wrote:

Should work fine, I have ran Plan 9 on 600E and 600X for years... they
can still build a kernel in under a minute if my memory doesn't fail
me (certainly not much more).

uriel