Re: Distribution for low spec PC

From: David Douthitt (ssrat_at_mailbag.com)
Date: 11/21/03 

Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2003 14:37:45 -0600

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003 09:23:44 -0800, Steve Kirkendall
<skirkendall@dsl-only.net> wrote:

>Joseph Haig wrote:
>> Can anyone suggest a distribution to put on a 100 MHz Pentium 1 with
>> 32Mb RAM. It only needs to be used as a wordprocessor with MS Word
>> files, so it needs OpenOffice (and we will have to live with that
>> being slow). The user is not very computer literate, so it would be
>> best if it could automount floppy disks like Mandrake can. However, I
>> understand that Mandrake is built with faster processors in mind and
>> so would not be very good for a Pentium 1. I am thinking of trying
>> Debian. Any comments?

>DO NOT RUN KDE OR GNOME! I wouldn't recommend KDE for anything running
>at less that 1GHz, and Gnome is nearly as bad. There are plenty of
>lightweight window managers out there that should work for you.

Nonsense. KDE is just fine on a Intel Pentium 75 or better - I don't
have anything more recent in my house than a Pentium 200. KDE is also
just fine on a MacOS/G3 running 800Mhz..... but that's another story
entirely :-)

For distros, I recommend SUSE 8.2, Red Hat 7.3, or FreeBSD 4.8 (no I'm
not stuck in the Linux camp :-)

I've run all three with KDE on a Pentium 100Mhz machine with no
trouble. Most important thing is _RAM_ - anything less than 64M will
be painful.

The Linux kernel seems to take up more memory than the BSD kernel - so
I tend to favor BSD for the tiny RAM based environments.

Also, OpenOffice is quite slow in 64M - I wouldn't even think it in
32M. Abiword is good but it wants memory too (but not as much as
OpenOffice).

I tend to favor KOffice - which is easy to use and should be lighter
weight.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem is Microsoft data conversion. And
if you have Word templates (DOT files) almost nothing can convert them
- and Macros aren't much better.

Excel files are best converted with Gnumeric - my spread*** of
choice.

As for Windowing environments, if you are stuck with 32M, you'll need
something else. I prefer 9wm - probably the smallest you'll see - but
it's not what I call "user friendly" (maybe geek friendly... hee hee).
There's also pwm but it's in the same category as 9wm.

I like AfterStep but it may require some adjustment by a former
Windows user. I like icewm for my "gimmee a windows interface!"
days.... and it's light weight and has nice features.

If you've a Mac user on your hands, consider a Macintosh UI (mwm?).

David Douthitt (david@douthitt.net)
UNIX System Administrator
HP-UX, Unixware, Linux
Linux+, LPIC-1