Re: OpenSuSE for older computer?

On Sun, 19 Oct 2008 11:12:41 -0500, HarryB wrote:

Since I have never used Linux, I didn't know anything about the different
types of desktops. I don't understand how or why one GUI would use more
resources than another, but a little research convinced me that there can
be big differences. So, your suggestion to look for a light GUI was very
helpful.

so the first thing youare going to want to find is a installation that
allows you to choose which GUI(windows manager) you want and offers you a
choice. That choice may consist of rejecting all guis on install, then
usue an internet updater (apt-get on debian, rpm on redhat, ??? uses yum)
that allows you to go get the very light weight windows manager you want.

I currently rn iec icewm on Debian sarge and etch on PII with 256Mb of ram
with thunderbird for mail, firefox for browser and pan for usenet.

However, my P120, with only 64MB of ran still runs twm and is very, very
slow, I suspect that low ram is the real issue, but as that isn't a
desktop boxen any more, the WM rarely gets used (oh, it still works sort
of test).

the enlightenment WM was around at the time that this boxen was setup and
it was just too bloaty, even then. No experience with XFCE.

The other problem will be that having loaded your windows manager, you may
find that applications like firefox are not usable as they themselves are
just too much bloatware, or that you can only use one at a time.

You should be able to install multiple linux installations with lilo,
grub, etc. The only gotcha might be you hardware seeing the boot
partitions, e.g. you might have to set up a small /boot (10Mb?) for each
of the distros as the first fewpartitions. This relats to older hardware
not being able to see the full, modern hard disks, so you fudged the
bios HD figures to make it look like one that it could handle and within
that 'size' you installed the linux loaders that could then use the
full hard disk.

Good luck. you will get to try a lot of the linux windows managers.



.

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