Linux or BSD on tiny HD?

[Henry Spencer]

On Thu, 3 Feb 2005, Steve wrote:
> ...Thing is it only has 540MB (yes, 1/2 Gig) hard drive (but it's
> got 192MB RAM thankfully). I basically want a light-weight distro just
> to play around with (still learning linux)...

One disadvantage of playing with Linux on a small disk is that you won't
be able to fit a lot of the nicer toys. :-)  You can certainly put a
workable Linux environment on a disk that size, but it will definitely
be rather stripped-down.

> So my question is for suggestion of either Linux or BSD distros to
> install on that small of a drive...

I've done Red Hat installs (although with now-obsolete versions) on disks
that small, but it did take careful selection of the packages to install,
and it might be easier to use a distribution that's built small to begin
with.  (I have no specific recommendations on that.)

> Part 2 of my question is that I want to be able to connect my ethernet
> card from this computer to my windows box to share/access files there.
> Do I need a router, or is there a way to connect two computers
> directly?

You can connect two machines (with Ethernet ports) together directly with
an Ethernet "crossover" cable; any computer store will have those.  This
doesn't generalize to more than two, however -- as soon as you add a
third, you need a hub/switch/router and "straight-through" cables to
connect the machines to it. 

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml