Xubuntu on 1999 Dell PIII 450mhz and 128 megs ram; not enough

Walter Dnes waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org
Sun Apr 29 03:22:09 UTC 2007


On Sat, Apr 28, 2007 at 02:43:13PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote

> Sad, but I'm not too surprised.  (I'm typing this into my MUA running
> on a k6-200, 64M, RHL7.0 box.)

  RHL7.3 was the end-user linux of its time.  I was sad when Redhat
dropped support for it.  RH8 and RH9 were bloated.  I tried them out and
went back to 7.3.

  After RH dropped support, I switched to Debian.  You may have heard
the old joke about Debian having 3 versions... "Rusty", "Stale", and
"Broken".  I actually preferred it that way.  I got tired of constant
upgrades with Redhat firing out version-du-jour (7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 6, and
9).  It did eventually bite me at one point when RealPlayer and Phoenix
(or was it Firebird by then?) came out with security updates that would
not install because Debian's versions of gtk and some other lib were too
old.  I switched to Crux and then to Gentoo.

> | the Dell keeps pace with my AMD3000+
> 
> In what sense "keeps pace"?  Is it that both are limited by your
> typing speed?

  In the sense that I don't notice any speed difference.  Web pages,
popmail, ssmtp, usenet, and linux mirrors are limited by their servers.
In the case of webpages, you may also run into HTML that deliberately
won't display the full page until after an overloaded ad-server has spit
out its banner ad.  Streaming audio is no problem.  It's the graphics-
intensive stuff like editing large photos in Gimp and watching streaming
video where the older machine falls down.

> |   Ubuntu is also probably compiled as
> | i386.  I set Gentoo to build with...
> | CFLAGS="-O2 -march=pentium3 -fomit-frame-pointer -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse"
> | plus I throw in "mmx" and "sse" use flags.
> 
> How much difference do you expect that to make?  I would expect a
> CPU usage difference that would be negligible.

  "That depends".  PostgreSQL pounding away on your hard drive probably
isn't going to see any noticable difference.  mplayer, using mmx and sse2
will improve your "internet TV" experience.  On newer CPUs with mmxext,
sse2, sse3, 3dnow, etc, it gets even better.

  A couple of personal experiences I've had over the years.  Remember
way back when, when Mozilla 0.9x (no, *NOT* Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox
0.9x) was the current beta?  The people who complain about Firefox being
slow today would absolutely freak out with Mozilla 0.91 on a 450 mhz
PIII with 128 megs of ram.  That was *REAL* slow.  Long before I ran
Gentoo, this was my first time with optimizing the compilation.  I'm
*NOT* a programmer.  I downloaded the tarballs and blindly followed
instructions.  I may as well have been running RPM.  I did see a
noticable speedup as a result of the optimizations.  Mozilla 0.91 became
almost usable on the Dell.  At about 0.95, I made it my "production"
browser, as it was becoming half-decent, with optimization.

  Then there is Xboing, an abandoned game that I first loaded under
Debian.  It has speed levels from 1..9.  I could handle up to level 3
under Debian.  *ON THE SAME MACHINE* under Gentoo, the balls went
whizzing past me so fast I couldn't play it, even at speed level 1.  The
game has been long abandoned.  I followed instructions on the Gentoo
forum.  Instead of automatically emerging Xboing, I manually stepped
through the process until the source code was unpacked.  Then I edited
the C source code and greatly increased the delay factor in a timing
loop.  Then I resumed the build.  The modified game is playable.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org> In linux /sbin/init is Job #1
Q. Mr. Ghandi, what do you think of Microsoft security?
A. I think it would be a good idea.
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