The new Debian etch release schedule

Posted Mar 15, 2007 0:31 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: The new Debian etch release schedule by maney
Parent article: The new Debian etch release schedule

Not I.

The leastest (is that a word? It should be if it isn't) machine I ever had Linux installed on was a old 386 Thinkpad laptop with 6 megs of RAM. This was maybe 4 years ago? I had to use a special floppy-edition that was unusual (most floppy-based distros required you to load the disk into RAM to free up the disk for more stuff. I didn't have enough ram to do that). Then I had to install my software using packages from some ancient version of Slackware.

I wanted to use it as a serial terminal. Ended up blowing Linux away and went with MSDOS + kermit. (nowadays I'd use freedos). I liked that a lot. It is my opinion that no laptop should ever be thrown away as long as it has a decent screen, a keyboard, and a serial port. :-)

What is the longest anybody here has had a single Debian install going, (especially if it was for a personal desktop)?

I know I had one install going from about 3 years and a few months, which I know isn't that long. I tracked unstable and I actually transfered it from drive to drive once as my hardware gradually upgraded. It probably outlasted 3 major revisions of hardware for my desktop.

The new Debian etch release schedule

Posted Mar 15, 2007 1:03 UTC (Thu) by maney (subscriber, #12630) [Link]

Hmmm... it was a long time ago. Maybe 4MB wasn't quite enough for the installer, even though it was plenty for a small server or firewall sort of thing and I've misremembered the numbers. There were a couple of these old 386SX desktop boxes sitting aorund, so I might have stuffed two machine's portions into one for installation. They were the remains of a DOS/Windows 3.x lab that was on its last legs, and I'm thinking that 4M would have been fairly hefty for that (bearing in mind they were old ten years ago, and that district *always* bought the minimal spec they could get away with at the time of purchase).

Anyway, as near as I recall, Debian's release schedules were kind of flexible even back then. :-)

The new Debian etch release schedule

Posted Mar 15, 2007 1:04 UTC (Thu) by rmayr (subscriber, #16880) [Link]

My desktop machine is running Debian unstable since about 1999, and still
counting. And yes, it's basically the same install from back then, I just
regularly try to spend some time to clean up old cruft.

The new Debian etch release schedule

Posted Mar 15, 2007 14:31 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

> What is the longest anybody here has had a single Debian install going, (especially if it was for a personal desktop)?

I know of two desktop machines (only one being used daily) that started their
life with Slink (in 1999) and are still running now, after being upgraded to each newer release up to Sarge and they probably be upgraded to Etch once it is released.

On a unrelated note, I managed to install woody on a m68k with 4Mb of RAM.
(a Falcon 030 at 16MHz).

The new Debian etch release schedule

Posted Mar 15, 2007 16:59 UTC (Thu) by a9db0 (subscriber, #2181) [Link]

I've an old firewall that started with (pause whilst I dig through a large stack of CDs) Potato. Currently a Sarge/Etch blend. Still runs fine. I'll replace it when some component of it dies - though it's a 10 year old Compaq P90 that shows no signs of failure.

Longest-running Debian installation?

Posted Mar 16, 2007 18:12 UTC (Fri) by stevem (subscriber, #1512) [Link]

My first Debian installation from October 1996 is still going. It has been migrated across to new disks and new hardware multiple times in the interim, and (obviously) upgraded quite a few times since.

It was my only machine at the time, a 486 DX4/120 IIRC. It's now running on a dual-core AMD64 and is the main server at home, used for NFS space, music and (of course) the local Debian mirror. It's also the machine where most debian-cd development work happens.

The only thing that may kill it now is the fact that I'd like to move over from i386 to amd64. Once I do the etch upgrade, I'll look into that; I hope I can find a way to keep it going despite an architecture change... :-)

The new Debian etch release schedule

Posted Mar 17, 2007 10:53 UTC (Sat) by Segora (subscriber, #8209) [Link]

For me it was a custom installation based on Debian (whatever was current in '95) on a 386SX16 w/ 2MB, as far as I remember. Stripped down kernel, UUCP, some console mail user agent. Probably something like Xpoint would have worked better, but hey - it worked good enough and was completely free.