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| I have this old pentium 133 with 32Mb of Ram which I'd like to
| convert to a linux box. I'm new to linux, and I'd like to know
| what can I expect from it running on such an outdated box. I'd
| use mainly for text editing and processing, but I was hoping it
| could handle some programming (c++ and java) work. For the
| record, borland's compiler runs fine on this machine under
| windows, djgpp is slower but still acceptable. Also, what GUI
| would you recommend me knowing that memory is an issue? What
| distro should I get? I know there's no such thing as a "best
| distro", but what would you generally recommend to a new linu user
| who's running it on an old computer? I know I won't be able to run
| all those fancy GUIs and stuff like that... I'm simply looking
| for stability and acceptable speed. For heavy-slow-crashing
| software I have another machine running another OS.
|
While I normally run on a fast SMP machine with 512MBytes main
memory, I also run on a Pentium 166 with 256MBytes main memory. That
machine had only 64 MBytes of memory in it, and it ran Red Hat Linux
6.0 just fine with GNOME/Enlightenment running the windows and
desktop, but when I installed Red Hat Linux 7.3 it thrashed like the
*ens. I decided to increase the memory to the max the board would
take (256MBytes), but the new memory came in one stick at a time.
~From this, I determined that if you want to run GNOME/Sawfish (what
comes with R.H.L.7.3 if you do not want KDE), you need 128 Mbytes
minimum. It is still a little slow, and since I am used to a dual
550MHz Pentium III setup, it is annoying, but not much worse than
Windows 95 that also runs on the old machine.
For example, Mozilla takes about 20 seconds to come up on the old
machine, but only about 2 seconds on the fast machine. Of course,
the old machine has Western Digital Caviar disk drives (5400 rpm,
IIRC) on the ADAPI interface (or whatever it is called) and the new
one has 10,000 rpm hard drives on an Ultra-2 SCSI interface, which
may account for some of it.
If you can increase the memory, I suggest doing so. If you cannot, I
suggest finding a smaller, leaner, meaner desktop manager than
GNOME/Sawfish.
- --
~ .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642.
~ /V\ Registered Machine 73926.
~ /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://www.veryComputer.com/
~ ^^-^^ 12:10pm up 9 days, 19:28, 3 users, load average: 2.07, 2.07,
2.02
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