Herbert Graf writes:

> Linux is pretty resource hungry. While CPU is important, memory is MORE
> important. Personally, to run FC4 I would recommend a minimum of a
> Pentium4/AMD Athlon XP and at least 512MB of memory.

Egads!  It's one thing to hear this from ignorant reporters, but
something entirely different from an engineer!

The Linux *kernel* can still be made to run without much difficulty on
a 386 with 4 megs of RAM.  It is only the bloated linux-kernel-based
*distributions* (such as Red Hat and Suse) that have more intensive
resource requirements.  Other distributions are far less resource
intensive.

For example, I have Linux running just fine on a old Toshiba Libretto
micro-laptop with a 166 Mhz Pentium-MMX cpu and 64 megs of RAM.  This
machine is a touch on the slow side when running X/Windows, but it
runs just fine in text console mode.  Another laptop is a 233 Mhz
Pentium with 96 megs, which I use a network music client in my
bedroom.  It runs X/Windows, XMMS, and Firefox just fine.  (Slowly,
but then I'm never in a rush in the bedroom.  ;-)

Now granted, I'm a long-time Linux user and I know what I'm doing.
Most of the lightweight linux distributions do *not* come with all of
the fancy auto-configuration tools you get in Redhat and Suse, and if
you aren't lucky enough for things to just work out of the box, you
could be in for many hours of hair-pulling.

But all that said, the tools for PIC development under Linux are far
more limited than those available under Windows.  For example, last I
checked, you still couldn't use the ICD2 for debugging under Linux.
Of course, even this isn't an issue if you only have a basic
programmer.

One of the reasons I made the switch from Linux to Windows was simply
because of the PIC development tools.  I'd certainly go back to Linux
in a heartbeat if the tools were available.  But even that isn't
*really* the issue for me.  What *I* want is better integration with
Emacs.  I run Cygwin under Windows, and for the most part, I'm quite
happy with that, and for the most part I can forget that I'm running
on top of a Windows kernel instead of a Linux kernel.  Simply porting
MPLAB as-is to Linux really wouldn't help me all that much, because
I'd still have no better integration with Emacs.

-p.
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