My computer at home is a 400 MHz AMD K6-2 with Slackware 9.1 installed. It's got 256 MB of RAM. I use KDE 3.1. It is slightly more sluggish than a new P4 computer, but that is not very noticable with the email, web browsing, and office applications I use 99% of the time. It's been running for a year with no problems and I use it all the time.
The performance difference between 128 and 256 MB is big.
For kicks I installed Slackware 8.0 in my old 25 MHz 386 with 8 MB of RAM. The Slackware is installed on a 6 GB drive. No X, the VGA video is vintage 1989 and I can't find an X-server that supports the chipset. It has a network card and I can email, ftp, and surf the internet in text mode just fine. It also has Windows 3.1 on a 245 MB hard drive, with Winsock and NSCA Mosiac, and it will e-mail and surf the internet with Windows 3.1 as well. Surfing is more like a slow paddle, though. The internet has grown up the past 12 years. I still have this computer because it cost $3,000 new and I just can't part with it.
Justin Lamar
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. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list [email protected] http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug