[uClibc]uClibc-based server

[Bruce J.A. Nourish]

I've rolled several customized uClibc systems from scratch, so perhaps I 
can throw in 2 cents.

To speak firstly of speed vs. size: I'm going to go out an a limb here 
and say that for systems with <64MB RAM, for any non-trivial 
application, small size == speed. On these old systems (say, early 
Pentium or less), your bottlenecks will be slow data busses (ISA) and 
antediluvian hard drives. Furthermore, you state that your distribution 
will be concerned with network servers. On almost any such application, 
the bottleneck is network speed, not processor speed. The memory you 
save by using uClibc will go towards something rather more useful, like 
a disk cache, so you don't have to wait a year for your PIO-mode-3 hard 
drive to get the data. Or it may prevent your program code from bieng 
paged out, so it doesn't have to be paged in (at great expense) later.

As for your troubles with -lnsl: I'm not quite sure why you need this 
(I've always managed to avoid it), but if you like, I'll take a look at 
your problem off list. This is. an example of some of the heartache 
you're letting yourself in for. However, if you intend to run stuff like 
MySQL and Apache on a 386, uClibc is really your best (only?) option.

-- 
Bruce J.A. Nourish <kode187 at kode187.net>