P1 128RAM

[Brandon Sandrowicz]

On Sun, Aug 02, 2009 at 01:48:14AM -0400, Walter Dnes wrote:
>   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>

* If a 'modern' distro is going to be used on an old Pentium I system,
then he'll need to use an 'alternate' install CD as opposed to the
livecd installs.

* I would suggest rolling your own kernel. Even though modern distros
try to cover all bases by just compiling a million things as modules,
some of those modules are loaded by default, whether you want them or
not. (Case in point: When I insert the kernel AES modules in Ubuntu to
mount my secure swap space, I get a couple of error messages about
modules that were not able to load. Tracking these down I found out that
they are modules for embedded crypto chips on Via Nano/etc
miniITX/nanoITX boards. The reason that I'm getting errors is that they
are installed be default and try to load when the kernel AES modules are
loaded, and fail when they can't communicate with the hardware they are
for... If these modules were able to load without the hardware being
present I would have irrelavent modules taking up memory space)

* Debian (as already suggested) or Slackware would probably be good
choices though Debian is probably the easier choice.
You'd definitely have to use 'alternate' install CDs for most distros
out there nowadays. I would probably suggest even rolling your own
kernel so that you only are using what you need. Most common 'modern'
distros have tons of crap compiled in or set to load as default modules
that you probably don't need to make that bad boy run.



-- 
Brandon Sandrowicz
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists