From: Alfie Costa (agcosta@gis.net)
Date: Mon Jan 15 2001 - 08:32:34 CET
On 14 Jan 2001, at 20:50, Mark Roberts <mulinux@sunsite.dk> wrote (to Michael
Gruner) :
> Sounds familiar. On a low memory machine bzip2 will use more memory than
> is available. On my 486 with 4mb ram it takes about six hours to install
> an addon. 95% of that time is consumed by unzipping (and untarring) the
> addon. Even starting X doesn't take that long.
>
> I don't think there's anything you can do about it, except do the
> untarring by hand, from DOS. Or buy more memory. Sorry.
To avoid the labor of untarring by hand from MsDos, Winsor has mu v10.5 and
also v11.3 in ZIP archives here:
http://phoenixii.cjb.net/index.html
Another fix is to rearchive the addon on a fast machine, using a less memory
intensive bzip2 switch. The resulting file will probably be larger than the
original, though in some cases it's smaller, which is very surprising. Such a
file can be unbzipped on a low memory machine, quickly and with almost no
swapping.
Note that two variables must match up.
GFS = gain in file size from rearchiving.
ADS = remaining slack space on the addon disk.
Only if GFS < ADS will this trick work.
If GFS > ADS, then the new archive will be too big to fit on the floppy.
In general rearchiving is a poor solution, because mu is always archived with
the slowest bzip2 setting, which means every time one upgrades, the whole
rearchiving job would need to be done again. It might be useful however, for
making a "one size fits all" set of disks, for demonstration purposes.
To illustrate the value of such a disk, a negative example: last year I took a
muLinux boot disk to a friend's house to show off mu on an old computer he had
lying around. Unfortunately this computer only had 4 megs, so the boot disk
hung. It needed swap space, which I'd forgotten how to set up by hand. If I'd
known how to do that, it was still hopeless, because of the hours his computer
have needed to untar the bzip2 archive. That was an unimpressive demo.
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