Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Wednesday 02 February 2005 12:22 pm, Richard A. Franklin wrote:
(I was actually trying out a few distros in my spare time over the past few weeks, to see if anything is fast enough to use as a desktop on a PII 400, 128MB system. So far, the rpm distros are about equally slow, Knoppix installed well, but is only slightly faster, Slackware is somewhat faster ... but VectorLinux, which is a Slack variant, is by far the fastest ... VERY fast, actually, considering the hardware ... seems that it is designed for older hardware. Of course, choice of graphical interface is always a factor.).
Gentoo would appear to be an obvious choice. Of course, you have to endure the multi-day compiles, but you end up with nicely stripped and optimized binaries just for your system.
No chance of more RAM? Linux GUI's don't seem very happy with less than 512M, and if you're going to complie gentoo in 128M don't plan on doing anything else.
I have thought that a Gentoo install would be a nice way to sit out a snow storm. As for RAM, I had a couple more old machines dumped in my lap this afternoon. A K6/2-300 and a 200 MMX ... slow stuff, but they have a fair amount of RAM I can strip out to beef up the 400 MHz unit ... so maybe I'll try Gentoo, even if the weather is nice. Hopefully, I can get a 256 stick and two 128s to work together.
Still, VectorLinux with IceWM was surprisingly fast with only 128M. Somewhat "crude" and spartan, but adding Firefox and Thunderbird made it tolerable.
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