Re: Back To The Mainframe?

Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-04 00:28 (#2T2Y)

You paint a very appealing picture, Zafe. But.... With that light and underfeatured a system, relying so much on external services, might one/you be better served by a fixed appliance/terminal? No chance of corruption, everything in Da Cloud, etc. All the real action happens on your and other remote servers.

'Cause it sounds like that's what a superlight distro is accomplishing anyway, only with the vagaries and vulnerabilities of normal PC hardware.

Re: Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 1)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-10-04 19:28 (#2T39)

Maybe - but imagine an internet kiosk that boots from a read-only flash card, and runs from memory. You get a clean system with every boot, and if that gets you a reasonably good-looking desktop and an up-to-date version of Firefox, you've met the needs of 90% of your clients. Imagine a kiosk in a hotel lobby, for example.

Imagine a call center or database entry place where you can re-purpose some dirt-cheap, low-spec hardware. That's useful.

For me, on a more philosophical level, this is also interesting because it shows it can be done. The world would be a different place if developers were forced to be miserly with resources and think carefully about their constraints. Give everyone a new macbook with 5G of RAM and a top-speed hard drive, and you get akonadi/nepomuk (barf).

Re: Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-05 14:45 (#2T3Z)

Thanks, but still not seeing it. Going to the trouble of putting up a kiosk means that sub 100 MB or sub 1 GB storage is not a problem. Ditto for older hardware. Can't most distros still get running on a 486 or so?

I get that it's an interesting exercise, and I hate bloat more than most anyone, but I'm still not quite seeing the real world appeal. I guess embedded devices maybe, or something to contribute to wearables?

Re: Back To The Mainframe? (Score: 1, Insightful)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-06 02:04 (#2T4D)

A. No, you don't hate bloat "more than anyone." Otherwise you'd see more than zero use in getting rid of it.

B. Everyone (by which I mean, power nerds) loves running linux on all kinds of stuff, so what's wrong with running linux on old or embedded systems? Seriously, if you have nothing to contribute besides insults then don't even comment. You're selling keystrokes for hatred, and that's a crappy waste of everyone's time.

C. No, most distros don't run on a 486 anymore, at least not without a hell of a lot of customization. Many are compiled with optimizations so they don't run natively on anything below a PII or so. Also, most require a lot of work arounds to run on anything under 256 or 192 MB of RAM, so "runs on a 486" vs "runs on a 486 with an amount of memory that a 486 would have" becomes a concern.

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