4 Distro install/performance comparison

From: Michael Heiming (michael+USENET_at_www.heiming.de)
Date: 12/30/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2004 09:40:03 +0100

Hi!

Tried installing 4 distro, on an old box (for the fun):

(PII-350 - 196 MB RAM - 2 x 6 GB IDE HD - DVD/CDROM - Intel NIC -
ISA sound-card)

Distro used:

Fedora Core 3 - Mandrake 10.1 - Suse 9.1 - Debian 3.1

The results:

Installer blew away after some time, install impossible (removing
most hardware didn't helped), couldn't be bothered to invest more
time to get those running and it would have contradicted the
test:

- Fedora Core 3 & Mandrake 10.1

Install worked (all hw plugged in):

- Suse 9.1 & Debian 3.1

So installation left me with 2 systems to report.

Ease of installation:

- Suse installed without problems, took ages

- The new Debian installer worked fine & pretty fast, with a
  minor fiddling after the base system installed like a charm,
  to get X + KDE installed through apt. Apt didn't thought that
  X server is an obvious dependency to get KDE up and running.;(
  So the Debian installer required a little more fiddling but
  no rocket science.

Running:
- Suse worked but dog slow with KDE3 on the box.
- Big surprise, Debian with KDE 3.2 & openoffice & firefox
  performance like a champ on this older system.

Conclusion (so far):

- For a usable KDE system on older hw, use *Debian*.;)
- Due to apt-cache Debian installer outperforms yum/etc easily
  unless you have a pretty fast connection to your repositories.
- The Debian installer has made great progress since I tested it
  last time, a couple of ages ago. 

-- 
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)
mail: echo zvpunry@urvzvat.qr | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/'
#bofh excuse 155: Dumb terminal

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