FAQ

Why not just use [your favorite lightweight distro]?

Well, does it run on a 386 with 4MB of RAM? I mean, that's really the issue here. If there really is an existing LiveCD that runs on such a system, send it my way, maybe I'll stop developing BL-LCARS.

Why use such an old kernel?

Linux dropped 386 support in 3.18, so we have to use something older than that. BL3 and Slackware 4 shipped with the 2.2 series, and the 2.4 series is very compatible with 2.2. I haven't done any testing trying to build 2.6 as small as possible - it's hard to imagine it will be smaller and faster than 2.4, though.

2.4 is a good kernel - it's got SATA and USB support for XP-era systems, it supports every retro sound card, it supports tmpfs and devfs and other vaguely "modern" niceties, it even supports GPT partitions tables. I'm finding little reason to use anything newer.

Why not build from scratch?

Slackware 4 has quite a bit of useful software already built for it, and most all of it will run happily on ancient systems with minimal RAM. It would take me years to build everything included with Slack 4. Most of it is still very useful

But what about SSH+SSL

This is a huge problem. I can't get modern Dropbear or older OpenSSL to build :(

I have ideas about what's wrong, though, so work is ongoing.

I can't install to HD, my 386 doesn't have a 300MB HDD!!

BL-LCARS is deisgned, first and foremost, to suit my particular retro computing needs. I use IDE2SD adapters on nearly every system, BlueSCSI with a few more, and SATA SSDs through adapters with a few more still. So, hard disk space is basically never an issue for me. I only own two vintage hard drives of under 1GB and they're both in systems that can use much bigger flash card storage as well.

But don't fret, you can install BL3.5 the traditional way, and then add the LCARS packages on top. Be warned, there's no dependency tracking going on with the packaging, and lcarscfg.tgz will overwrite some of your user settings (potentially). You can always just extract the archive and selectively install individual files. Also, I recommend installing pkg-bl3.tgz first, as it will log the contents of each additional package you install afterwards (making it easier to track down dependencies, or manually remove packages).