@fryguy

Quote:

fryguy wrote: yikes 200mb harddisk space, i didn't thought it was that big? Or is that only when installating and the installation actually takes less space?

You can blame part of the extra room on the added functionality (the new drivers, built in USB stack, built in internet communications stack, built in MUI and Reaction, 24 bit icons, etc), part of it on the fact that PPC programs need to be more verbose than 68K programs (it's the price one pays for RISC - the benefit is faster code) and part of it on the ELF binary format. ELF is the file format used to store PPC executables, and it's not as compact as amiga hunks (used in 68K Amiga programs and libraries). It comes from the Unix world, where portability is seen as more important than disk space (with 20/20 hindsight, one can see that those Unix guys got it right big time). On the plus side, the bloat is mostly skipped over when the code gets loaded into memory, so it's only disk space that is wasted.

Still, 200MB for a complete OS install is pretty small by today's standards. Windows XP needs 1.5GB, and I don't know of any recent "desktop" Linux distros that will fit into 200MB (eg Ubuntu 7.10 requires 4GB - then again, that probably includes a ton of apps, so make it 1GB for the OS without Firefox, OpenOffice, etc). I have no idea what the requirements are for MacOS, but I'd be very surprised if they were much different.

Last edited by CodeSmith on 22-Oct-2007 at 10:30 PM.