Re: LYNX-DEV don't give a damn?

[David Woolley]

Foteos wrote:
> 
>       As an operator of a large freenet which uses Lynx in the ways
> that guided it's initial design, how bad has the Lynx image become, from
> your perspective, with respect to its needs for system resources?

Not from a freenet point of view, but I would put a vote in for
conditionals to allow the production of a very tight version of Lynx.

One of the latest features in Linux is the ability to load a compressed
filesystem into a RAM disk directly from the boot disk.  Although I
haven't yet built such a system, there is a fair chance that it is
possible to create a generic Lynx/PPP client for any given service
provider that would allow the Unix challenged to run Lynx just by
booting a floppy.  To do this, at all requires that it be possible to
get a minimal system (more than possible) and Lynx onto the floppy, and
that there is enough RAM (4M is probably too small, but with care 6M and
8M are possible).  Increases in the size of Lynx may mean that one can't
get a mail system on the disk (I'm not sure that this is possible in any
case, but the principle could apply to other addons).


Such generic disks could also be done for a site using RARP or BOOTP,
although others would require a fuller system to configure individual
disks.  Passwords and account names are the only problems for the generic
PPP case, and might need a small application to collect them in a way which
gives an adequate impression of security (they'd only be stored in RAM, so 
still fairly secure).
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