Thanks for all the good feedback on Internet radio!
While playing with a FreeSBIE live CD (9-27-04 release, sporting an Italian flag) on an old computer last night, I found a very usable streaming broadcast browser:
http://www.nongnu.org/streamtuner/
which requires:
http://streamripper.sourceforge.net/
It isn't quite iTunes, but hey, it does the job quite well.
AND, it was fun to see how well FreeBSD found old hardware, found the dhcp server, and played music.
(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.).
Rick
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.
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.
Kclug mailing list [email protected] http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
On Wednesday 02 February 2005 11:20 pm, Richard A. Franklin wrote:
I have thought that a Gentoo install would be a nice way to sit out a snow storm.
Actually, what you do NOT want to do with gentoo, particularly on an older, slow machine, is to babysit the compile phase of the install. Get it started, go away, and come back later. Seriously, like check back the next day.
As for using binary packages, the whole point of gentoo is to have everything optimized to your machine. If you're going to use binary packages, there are better distros to choose.
(Gentoo binaries would be useful on a machine where you didn't care about performance and which needed to fit in to a gentoo environment.)
On Wednesday 2 February 2005 21:48, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
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.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that it was proven scientifically that Gentoo optimized binaries are no more efficient than the generic 386 stuff distributed by other distributions. I think it had something to do with the 586 and 686 stuff having mostly to do with using MMX, SSE(1|2), and 3DNow! only in multimedia applications and since 386 labeled stuff can be built to use those 686 features if needed, the benefit to building everything -march=686 is negligible.
Personally, I think that the speed that people 'feel' in Gentoo is due in large part to building everything from scratch and -- by extention -- not throwing everything and the kitchen sink in to the start-up sequence as is done is many distributions. In Gentoo I might have had maybe 7 daemons running at all times where as in a fresh Debian install I might have 10 that I may or may not need (simply because after installing a server software, it's automatically added to boot). In RedHat or SuSE it would be in the order of maybe 12 daemons.
There is one area in which Gentoo can out-perform other distros: prelinking. Technically, though, it's experimental and doesn't always work. And it only helps on the start-up of applications.
Having said all that, I like Gentoo for it's bleeding edge flexibility; not it's speed.
My recommendation: A Debian variant like Ubuntu or Mepis with IceWM as your WM. The time you'll save on doing software updates is the major benefit here. Ubuntu comes with Synaptic which makes doing updates virtually a no-brainer. I'm not sure about Mepis.
On Thursday 03 February 2005 12:09 pm, Jason Clinton wrote:
Well, that's typical for his Crypto application. For those of us who don't care to install and configure a bunch of software just to read his posts:
I seem to recall reading somewhere that it was proven scientifically that Gentoo optimized binaries are no more efficient than the generic 386 stuff distributed by other distributions.
Personally, I think that the speed that people 'feel' in Gentoo is due in large part to building everything from scratch and -- by extention -- not throwing everything and the kitchen sink in to the start-up sequence as is done is many distributions
My, what a different song we hear now than when first we were adopting gentoo. I seem to recall raving praises about the speed of X when custom compiled.
Luminsoft sells SuSE instead of Gentoo now. Coincidence?
On Thursday 3 February 2005 13:14, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
My, what a different song we hear now than when first we were adopting gentoo. I seem to recall raving praises about the speed of X when custom compiled.
News flash: people change their opinions when they find more information. More at 11 after the film.
Luminsoft sells SuSE instead of Gentoo now. Coincidence?
I don't work there anymore. I own my own business.
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
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