Suggest a distro!

[Dustpuppy]

I've got the original laptop Noah had in the ark, and I'm wondering which distro would be best on it. OK, so it's not quite that old, but it's an Athlon 600Mhz processor, 3Gb hard drive and I think 128Mb ram but I can't remember. I've got Mandy 10 on it at the moment, but it grinds away quite a bit and every so often seems to run out of KDE memory and won't open anything.

 

So the question is: which Linux distro would be best to put on it? I'm looking for something really pared down that will run my essential things well and nothing else. I've got two desktops to do anything fancy on, my laptop is a work machine only. So I need it to run a web browser and Kile and that's about it.

 

Any ideas?

[arthur]

depends on your level of expertise. you can make mandrake really pared down (I once installed MDK 10 on an 800mb drive, PII266 and 128mb ram)

 

I recommend Rox for your file manager and fluxbox as the window manager, they're really light. However, kile will still need the KDE libraries, but that's no problem if you have the disk space.

 

then there's Arch, Gentoo <---(suicide), debian and slackware.

 

BTW, Dillo is a 200kb web browser

[arctic]

i'd say: if you want maximum speed out of your old lappy, use vector-linux. based on slack, uses icewm. very fast and lightweight.

[ac_dispatcher]

I have an old AMD K6-3/400mhx puter.

 

I have found that the "live-cd" distro's seem to run much quicker. I figure due to less bloat installed due to space limitations. That being said:

 

I just installed Mepis and it runs very fast (for a 400mhz)

 

I tried Mandy 10 / SuSE 9.1 and they ran but very slow at times. You may want to stay away from KDE or GNOME with that puter. I am a XFce4 lover myself. And Mepis has the links on its forums to install 4.2 beta! Man it just rocks

 

Sceenie

http://xfce-goodies.berlios.de/images/beta1_snapshot.jpg

(not mine from the xfce website)

 

Xfce4

http://www.xfce.org/

 

http://www.mepis.org/

[VeeDubb]

More than what distro 'to' use, I would suggest what 'not' to use.

 

I think you should NOT use any mandrake newer than 8.0 or any redhat newer than 7 or any version of Gentoo at all. We are after all talking about a laptop that is in the neighborhood of 4 years old, so using a distro that is any newer than 3 years ago, is probably making things harder than they need to be.

 

With each passing year, Linux get's bigger and beefier to take advantage af all the latest technological advances, but your laptop is still 4 years old.

[iphitus]

All poppycock ;)

 

I ran Mandrake 8.2 right up to 9.2, then Debian Unstable, and multiple 2.6 kernels on a 300mhz 6gb hdd computer. It would be about 7-8 years old now. I had 160mb ram and ran without any swap. For months at a time I was dual booting Debian and Mandrake. All on tiny 2gb partitions. During that time I used GNOME and Fluxbox mainly. GNOME ran fine, and dont let these people scare you from it. KDE was a little slow however. You would be best making sure you have a swap partition though.

 

Sometimes I think that people see older hardware and instantly think it's incapable of anything cool, new or decent, which is imho bullshit.

 

Anyway, my point is - run anything you want on it. Mandrake 10, Debian, Fedora, Suse........GNOME, gdesklets -- anything. If you find it too slow for your liking, move down to Fluxbox or another wm.

 

btw, I had a speed *increase* using Kernel 2.6 instead of 2.4 on that older computer, so keep that in mind.

[Gowator]

i tend to agree but its a matter of work...

If you pare the kernel down and recompile your own you will save memory and if you don't wanna play games for instance don't use the accelerated nvidia driver (assuming it was nvidia) ..

 

in the end there is nothing you can't make simpler/lighter but it might take some work but mainly I'd just switch FROM KDE to flux, IceWM etc.

[fangbite]

Your laptop sounds like mine (except I have 12gb hD) and I'm running fine with Mandrake 10 CE. The only prob is that some of the 3D games dont' work too well. Sigh, oh well.

[Dustpuppy]

Thankyou all!

 

I'm currently fiddling around with IceWM rather than KDE on my current installation and I'm extremely pleased with the performance. I hadn't realised that there is that much of a difference between different window managers - I'm still only a year into Linux and have used KDE for all of that except for a brief Gnome stint on Redhat 9 (RIP).

 

I shall bear in mind these comments, though, when I get back my even older desktop (P3 500MHz, 128MB ram, 13Gb hd)!

[DragonMage]

I think it's the RAM problem. If you only have 128 MB of RAM (that is total RAM without any subtraction caused by shared video or things like that), then Mandrake 10 with KDE, Mozilla, and OO.o will crawl. Runnable, but crawl.

 

Now if you can up the memory to something like 256, then you will see a great improvement in speed. If you can't try something lighter for your apps, such as XFCE, IceWM or Fluxbox for your Window Environment, Firefox for browsing, and Abiword for Word processor, etc.

[Urza9814]

Wow, that's better than my comp!

It's not just RAM...I tried that...went from 64MB to 320MB...barely noticed...

I would say...mandrake 9.2 if you can find the ISOs anywhere :P

yea...running 10.0 on a comp like that is like...uh...playing Everquest over 56K (probably...I've never seen it done though :P)

[mousematt]

Mandrake or pretty much any Linux distro can run on that sort of hardware. I happilly run a working Debian install on my lowly 366Mhz iBook.

 

Suggestions:

- use IceWM or XFCE4 with Rox as the file manager.

- reduce the colour depth to 16bit rather than 24bit

- use abiword/gnumeric instead of openoffice

- opera is the fastest browser imaginable on slower hardware (they embed it in cell phones)

- use xmms instead of a sophisticated audio player like rhythmbox, juk or amarok: all of these have a big backend (gstreamer etc)

- disable all non-essential services (eg. postfix, cron, isdn etc)

- make sure you have a disk swapfile

[theYinYeti]

The problem is not really what distribution to use or not to use. I have Mandrake9.1 running on a P.150MMX with 32MB RAM. And Mandrake10.0 running on a PII.350 with 192MB RAM.

 

The problem is rather deciding what applications to use/not to use.

 

IceWM is even lighter than fluxbox. So IceWM is a good choice. Myself, I use Matchbox on the P150 and Gnome/VNC on the P350.

 

For the file-manager, ROX is probably the best choice.

 

Overall, using gtk/qt apps is not a problem though using only one kind is better. But using full-gnome/kde apps is much heavier.

 

Yves.

[Dustpuppy]

Thanks, everyone, have a virtual beer on me!

I'm currently running 10OE with IceWM with Rox, Firefox, Kile and Abiword. I'm so impressed with the performance out of my old hardware! I've got it looking more or less how I want it, the only problem being no icons on the desktop :o

 

I'm now thinking of doing something similar when I get my old desktop (spec.s above) back from my sister-in-law - it's currently running Redhat 9 (I lent it to her a year ago) so will need something else when it returns. I want to set it up as my husband's work computer, but Abiword won't be suitable as he needs the higher functions of OpenOffice. What would be the best way of making that run OK? Is it simply going to be a case of upping the RAM?

[arctic]

What would be the best way of making that run OK? Is it simply going to be a case of upping the RAM?

as openoffice is a ramhungry beast, it is always good to increase ram for this big application. you can also speed up openoffice by giving it ~30mbram per default as storage and ~2.5mbram for mulitmedia-files. you just have to put these settings in the tools→options→memory folder. :)