Linux/Grass

[Tim Martin; FSO; Soil Sciences]

> 
> if someone were to take on the task of porting grass to linux,
> what would the hardware requirements be? 
> 

Linux runs on any 386 or better.  The operating system doesn't need
much disk space: with X11 and the gnu GCC compiler stuff you need
about 50Mb.  Linux runs with very little RAM, but you would want
at least 8Mb for any serious X11 related stuff.  The X port also 
requires SVGA, and not all video cards are supported.  The remaining
requirements are whatever is needed for grass.  I suspect an adequate
system for porting would be a 486 box with 8Mb ram, a 200Mb hard drive, 
and SVGA video. A much bigger SCSI drive would be required to do any
real work, of course.  And some kind of tape drive, but I'm not
sure which tapes are supported.

Linux is an exciting and rapidly developing free POSIX OS, with many
people working on it.  To find out more about linux, see the newsgroup 
comp.os.linux, or the ftp site tsx-11.mit.edu.

Disclaimer: I'm a beginner at both grass and linux. :)

Tim.

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  Tim Martin                   *
  Spatial Information Systems  *   These opinions are my own:
  University of Alberta        *      My employer has none!
  martin at cs.ualberta.ca        *
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