Re: lightweight linux for low power cpu's

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Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2003 23:18:53 -0700

my 2 cents:
As a hobbiest playing with Linux (Slackware, Mandrake, RH) and tired of
patching my MSWIN boxes, I would recommend Slackware 9.1 for older CPUs.
 I have it up and running on an IBM Thinkpad 1400 (2611-450) P233MMX,
64MB,~4GB HD and plan to dula boot on my Athlon800 box.
I'm playing with KDE (a bit sluggish on graphic intensive apps and when
sound plays) and Gnome (fairly fast a lean) Both are as fast or faster
than Win98. Had problems with alsa until I stopped trying to use isapnp
and asla pnp at the same time (alsa pnp works great). The Yamaha
OPL3SA2/3 chips can be a pain to set up on laptops under Oss/free and
isapnp. PCMCIA pnp worked flawless on a 3Com network card. Only trick
is that you'll have to edit a config file manually to set up IP, mask
etc. since the net utility is fro PCI cards (set for loopback if usinig
PCMCIA NIC) The trick is to install only the packages you need (and
watch for dependencies: cdparanoia required for KDE noatun & kaboodle
and Gnome Nautilus... didn't load it since I wasn't going to rip cds).
In the end I may grab a few apps from KDE and go with Gnome since it is
faster. X installed fine and setup was smooth. For the 1024x768 native
FT screen and Neomagic chip. run 16 bit - plenty good enough for
office stuff. I also run just the daemons I need: telnet and ftp for
access from my min box to archve and transfer files. No samba, apache,
or other junk).

I like OpenOffice on Win2k - way faster than MS Office 2K with as many
(and some more) features. Have not yet tested on the thinkpad until I
settle on a GUI.

For the console purists out there - Slackware by default goes right to
the console on boot. I often skip the GUI for numerous admin tasks and
programming - I even usually play music cds from the console. But for
office and web browsing stuff I'll never give up a good WYSIWYG GUI .

In short, even with KDE, and/or gnome, a few trips to to the web,
how-tos and man pages to learn to set it all up, I have a perfectly
fast enough system for office tasks, simple games, CD/mp3/ogg playback,
MPEG1/AVI (MPEG2 a bit slow full screen and forget MPEG4 or DiVx - but
thats the fault of the Neomagic chip), JPEG viewing.

Bob Davis wrote:

> Hi
>
> I want a linux graphical desktop.
> A browser.
> A office suite.
>
> And here is the kicker.
> I want it to run as fast as win98 on a p200 with 64mb of ram(I have a
> lot of them from work). What could I remove from the std distro to
> make it run faster and use less memory? What are my other options for
> open(free) software to do what I want?
>
> I am running rh7.3 as a server for home and also using it to dabble
> with the graphical desktop but it slways seems to run slow and take up
> lots of ram.
>
> I really like the new firebird and thunderbird combo which I am
> running on winxp at work and I just installed star office 1.1 on my
> home win2k machine and it works great.
>
> bob
>

• Previous message: Mike: "Re: laptop<->beamer : refresh frequency and svideo-out on my laptop"
• In reply to: Bob Davis: "lightweight linux for low power cpu's"
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