P1 128RAM

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:49:11AM +0200, edward chin wrote
> Does anyone have any recent experience with a distro on something
> this old?  There are lots of suggestions on fora like DSL, Puppy,
> Deli, and even Mepis 6.5 (I've been unable to locate an iso even at
> their site - it bounces to 8.0.06).  Most posts say stay away from
> DSL. I tried two v of Puppy but can't get it to run on this box.
> I'm sending this post from the box cited using Knoppix 3.2, but the
> video output is poor.
> 
> The box is from ACER MMX 233

  I had a 1999 Dell that died in the summer of 2007 (two years ago).  It
had 128 megs of RAM, a 450 mhz PIII, and an 8 meg video card.  Towards
the end it was doing great for most stuff, but internet TV was dropping
frames, and editing 2560x1920 photos with GIMP was "rather liesurely".

  I was running Gentoo linux on it.  Sure cpu-specific optimization
helps, but it could have been any other distro.  The real secret is the
desktop environment... or lack thereof.  Don't even *THINK* about GNOME
or KDE.  Even XFCE is probably too heavy.  Use Blackbox or Fluxbox as
the WM (Window Manager) with any modern distro, and you'll be OK, but
slow.  Don't expect icons or fancy program launchers.  I cobbled
together a simple program launcher with hardly any overhead.

  Re your video problem, can you sudo and run the command

lspci -v

...and post the portion of the output relating to your video card card?
In my case, it's...


02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO]
(rev 01) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
        Subsystem: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO]
        Flags: bus master, 66MHz, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 21
        Memory at d0000000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
        I/O ports at cc00 [size=256]
        Memory at fdef0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        [virtual] Expansion ROM at fde00000 [disabled] [size=128K]
        Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2


-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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