Shrinking Debian
I tried Debian for the first time today (what took me so long, I wonder?). Not as my main distro for my PC - I remain firmly attached to Gentoo - but on an ancient machine I'm trying to set up as a sort of thin client containing only an X server, a web browser, and x3270. This is a demo of something that might end up replacing a load of dumb terminals at my Dad's work, since they're changing e-mail system from a mainframe-based one to a web-based one.
My mission is to create a Linux installation with the above-mentioned features, on the lowest-spec machine possible. I'm starting out with a 486 DX/2 50 MHz machine with 24 Mb of RAM and a 255 Mb hard disk (this was my first computer, incidentally, but upgraded from its original 25 MHz / 4 Mb / 129 Mb configuration!).
The main barrier at the moment is disk space. The Debian base system takes up half of my 215 Mb data partition - and that's without X etc. I'm still trying to get the absolute bare minimum of packages, but I may have to end up swapping disks. I'm thinking about using the e2compr disk compression patch, but I think that might be terrible on a 50 MHz machine....
dialog and whiptail
A gripe about an annoying bug in these two programs.
Firstly, some background info: these programs display dialog boxes in text mode, from shell scripts. They have a number of modes of operation, e.g. a yes/no box, a message box, an input box, etc. And an "info box" - which is different in that it's supposed to draw the dialog on the screen and then exit immediately, leaving the dialog on the screen, but allowing the shell script to continue executing and to display another dialog when it is ready. E.g. an infobox could be used for a "please wait" message.
But the infobox mode only works when TERM="linux", i.e. on text consoles. If you try and run it in xterm etc, then no dialog appears, just a blank screen. (I suspect that actually the dialog is drawn, but the screen is blanked on exit, i.e. immediately afterwards!) This is annoying, and I can't find a way around it.
If anyone knows a workaround, or an alternative dialog program which has the feature I need but doesn't suffer from this problem, then please tell me. Thanks.