Dreaming of a lean installation method [was Re: *nix on

[Angel Martin Alganza]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 11:33:54AM -0400, Ken Seefried wrote:
 
> I'll expand on my original suggestion: fork something from the NetBSD 1.x 

I didn't understand what you meant by your original suggestion of
forking.

> ClassicBSD would need to be about 'have to have' functionality, not 'nice 
> to have' functionality.  Just as long as we all agree NetHack stays. 

I couldn't have though of a better way of saying it: 'have to have' is
exactly what I would love to see on an OS which I would use a lot.

> Note that "fork" != "stagnate".  You'd need to build a community, but for a

Again, I didn't find the words to express what I said before (...kept
current or modern...); not to stagnate is the right word for the idea I
had in mind.

> BTW...if you aggressively avoid eye candy, even X11 can be relatively 
> useful on old hardware.  Strip out all the bloaty modules and drivers (you 
> probably don't need OpenGL and font smoothing is a luxury you can't afford) 
> turn off all the fancy options (no, you can't have opaque moves...not 
> yours) and keep to a bare minimum WM. 

I, for one, don't need anything else than Ion, a framed, tiled, tabbed
window manager which allows me to cut out my screen on frames to keep
as many xterms (with screen and ssh connections) as I can fit; or to
have just one frame with one xterm on it, when the screen is small
(640x480, for instance).

> There are even lighter choices...fork a "classic" X release (like 11.3...as 
> if your hardware supports any of the functionality added since then) or 
> someone could raise from the dead/port MGR or some such. 

I'd love to use MGR, or W (I still keep a PicoBSD+W floppy which I
very much like), or whatever which allows what I've just described
before. Nothing fancy, eye candy or whatever.

Cheers,
Angel

-- 
Angel Martin Alganza               Tel +34 958 248 926
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