[Rule] fc5 testing report

[M. Fioretti]

On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 20:34:10 PM +0200, Franz Zahaurek  fzk at fzk.at 
wrote:

> Kargiotakis George <kargig at noc.uoi.gr> writes:

> >From now what I did was on my own.

Well, on your own... but with the same packages and system (fedora)
used by many people, with a very active user community. The very
reason why RULE was formed was exactly to pass the initial obstacle
(the installer) while:

* still keeping the user in a large community not limited to hard-core
  hackers, something which doesn't happen with specialized low-hw
  distros.
* saving the members from the burden of creating and maintaining another
  distribution and/or supporting its users.

The beauty of RULE/slinky is that, if you've managed to install kernel,
system libraries, rpm and a few other things, then you can (should) go
directly to the main fedora list to get a much better support than the
few of us here could ever provide.

> > Adding more packages is really easy with yum, yet there is a problem with yum
> > and old machines.

I have run apt-get on my previous PC (350 MHz, 128 MB of RAM) until 5
months ago, and it didn't give me any performance problem.

> > Another point I would like to make here is how bloated some fedora
> > packages are. [...]
> 
> The only thing we can do about that, is to cry together.

Not true :-) Please read, for example, the mini-kde page:

	http://www.rule-project.org/article.php3?id_article=1

That is an approach that can truly reduce disk space, and to some
degree RAM requirements too, whose beauty is that it requires more
time and patience than real software skills. Please George let us know
what you think, and/or if you can repeat the same process with other
packages.

Above all, please let us know if you find any problem with the
MINI-KDE documentation and procedure, so we can fix together. I'd
really like to have it tested by somebody else.

> > Still no typing though and no greek chars in console. But I think
> > I will manage that too...sooner or later.

Same suggestion as above. Please check on the normal Fedora lists,
since there is surely some Greek user, or somebody expert on these
issues there.

> > I still can't find any program to take screenshots in fedora with
> > only a few decent dependencies that will not waste all the
> > precious resources of this old laptop :)

There was a script I put together for this, but I can't find it now
:-( Anyway, it was using the same tools that Franz mentioned, so you
are probably better off studying their man pages, there are only a few
options to remember.

> > Running new versions of software on old machines is something very
> > very nice.  Even if was only for security reasons (which is not
> > the case here) it would be a great project.

Yes, I do make a big deal every time I can that RULE is not ONLY for
older HW, it's just a great idea even in those cases.

> > But aren't all these dependencies from fc5 hogging down the
> > system?

See above. The point/advantage/limit is to NOT do another specialized
distro, changing the smallest possible amount of stuff (see mini-kde,
kdrive) when absolutely needed.

Hope this helps.

Thanks again for your participation,

	Marco

-- 
Marco Fioretti                    mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 3 for low memory      http://www.rule-project.org/

According to one popular definition, craziness is doing the same thing
over and over but expecting different results.