Re: New-B 6.x pre-install questions

Warren Block wrote:

Kaitlyn Luna <Kaitlyn> wrote:
Should be fine. X will run if you want it; I tried it on a P120 a
couple of years ago.

I thought X would be a lost cause. I already tried MEPIS (installed to
the hard drive), and it made glaciers look like the Concorde. It'd take
a full minute to open a terminal window, and the CPU load (as seen in
uptime) was never less than 2.30.

If that 3C515 is the same card I recall, you're better off without
it. No PCI bus in the machine, right?

The 3C515 is one of the few 10/100 ISA NICs out there.

It does have PCI, but I had to decide between giving the last PCI slot
to the sound card or the network card. If I switch to a PCI NIC, I've
got an Opti 82C931 ISA sound card.

The PCI NIC is a Linksys LNE100TX v4.1. I gave up on it when in Win95
it caused me multiple BSoD's every hour. When I switched to a SMC card,
I never saw a BSoD in Win95 again. That Win95 system is a P3 now
running Linux. Maybe FreeBSD has a good driver for that card?

I don't understand the question. If RAM is accessible, why not just
use it for RAM? Even slow RAM as main memory would be faster than
using it for swap.

I finally found the definitive answer. It's an Intel i403VX chipset,
and it supports caching only 64M of RAM.

The problem is L2 cache starts from the bottom, but operating systems
start from the top. Normally in Linux, the OS, X, etc. would all begin
loading in the uncached 64M of RAM. If I put Linux on that system and
used the special kernel option, I'd get the OS into the RAM that is
cached while the uncached top half becomes primary swap (of course, you
can still use a swap partition, too).

I first learned about all this in comp.os.os2.* when I tried putting
OS/2 on this system and found it slower than my 486 ran OS/2 with 48MB.


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