From: Alfie Costa (agcosta@gis.net)
Date: Fri Jul 27 2001 - 07:54:05 CEST
On 26 Jul 2001, at 15:26, Maciej Kalisiak <mulinux@sunsite.dk> wrote:
> The solution? Switch to gzip... requires far, far, FAR less
> memory for decompression; the penalty? 40Kbytes more on the diskette, but
> there was more than enough room on the 1.722 diskette. Perhaps there
> could be an alternate, .tar.gz set of addon diskettes for low memory
> machines?
That would be a good thing. The bzip archives cause trouble for novices twice.
First, folks get confused because the bzip files are renamed to "tgz" to
satisfy old (buggy?) versions of Netscape. Second, more confusion for those
who install mu on a low memory machine and bzip hangs it.
Michele once made the draconian argument that such additional complexity was a
good thing, because it frightened away new users who were too impatient to work
their way through this. It was a strange sort of intelligence test or hazing
ritual. That way fewer impatient or clueless users would clog up the mailing
list with obvious questions.
Maybe that argument is past its prime. Now most new users have powerful
computers with lots of RAM, so they aren't the ones who get tripped up...
instead it's the frugal users (who want to save old laptops and PCs) who are
being weeded out. But the frugal users are tenacious, and so every other month
the mailing list brings another thread about 4MB computers and misnamed bzip
files.
Also, if bzip only saves 40K, (for some reason I always thought it was more
than that), then getting rid of /bin/bzip2 (41208 bytes) from the boot disk
will save at least 20K, (assuming /bin/bzip2 was compressed).
Have you considered putting your .tgz mu boot disk on a web page somewhere?
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