That particular laptop is memory-limited anyway so later I tried installing FreeBSD 5.1 on it - without reading the instructions first! Now that was an anusing way to spend the afternoon But here I am being a distro slut again.
On first impressions, FreeBSD is yet another implementation of the Unix concept, though somewhat more scaled-down than Linux is. It was missing some of the basic commandline utils and I couldn't find them in the ports collection. Updating the box doesn't seem to be a painless easy procedure such as with Arch. But I'll try it again and get to know it better.
Looking forward to i586 Arch when it's available ..
]]> fileutils
sh-utils
textutils
.. but so far it's working correctly.
And before attempting to run pacman, you need to edit down /etc/pacman.conf so that the single current respository is that same i586 directory at ftp.archlinux.org.
This will give an old laptop a new lease on life so it can go be a demo linux machine for someone who wants to learn.
]]>i hope to have a net install capability soon though.
]]>What VC5 *did* show however was that it was downloading current.tar.gz from one of the regular Arch repositories and not the i586 set. Could this be the problem?
As a workaround, I downloaded the "base" set of packages, burned them to cd, and tried installing them through the cd-rom choice, but that complained about not finding the directory /src/arch/pkg/. I burned another cd with the packages in the directory it asked for, but that didn't work either.
Probably the next step is defining a custom server (the last choice on the list of servers when you first go through the FTP install choice) and pointing it to ftp://ftp.archlinux.org/testing/i586.
Any help in the meantime would be much appreciated. Thanks again to everyone who does the work on Arch.
]]>I'm thinking of installing it on my IBM Thinkpad 380XD laptop. Any suggestions about using it for this setup?
A 233mhz, 96mb mem, 4gb hd, 2mb video and 24x cdrom
Thnx.
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