Which distro? too slow for mandrake 10.2

[gjtomli]

I have a 266 mhz micron laptop with 128mb of ram. WAY TO FREAKIN' SLOW for Mandrake. Any sugestions? Tried live cds of puppy and dsl, but video is all screwed up (like 1 color, can't read anything)

[arctic]

I would say, Mandriva shouldn't be "too slow" on that laptop. What might be really slow is KDE and GNome, so maybe IceWM would be more useful for that system.

 

If you want to tet alternatives and DSL has some problems with your graphics, maybe you should try Vectorlinux or Slackware, but read their documentation before you decide to install them. Maybe they are too complicated for you, depending on your linux-knowledge.

[gjtomli]

So what you are saying is install a differnet gui? Never Heard of iceWM.

[arctic]

There are several different desktop options in Mandriva (and other distros, too). Some desktops eat lots of RAM, like KDE or Gnome. Others like Icewm, Windowmaker, Fluxbox or Rox use only little ressources and will let your system work faster. You can add them with the MCC, Software section, Install software, Graphical Environments

[Leo]

I am just getting to grips with Arch on my PII Compaq Armade M700. It runs really nicely and took a lot less effort to get the basic setup running than I expected.

 

Leo

[scarecrow]

I am just getting to grips with Arch on my PII Compaq Armade M700. It runs really nicely and took a lot less effort to get the basic setup running than I expected.

Leo

 

Maybe it's not the easiest of times to get acquainted with Arch, as some major changes happened lately (last one being the intro of initrd into the kernel), but I believe you can have an easy time installing and running what I consider being hands down the best AND easiest (at least for intermediate to advanced *nix users) distro available... you will just need the latest test ISO (0.7.1 test1) which boots by default an initrd enabled 2.6.14 kernel.

Actually a basic install from medium for Arch ends for me within ten minutes, which surely enough is a record to beat. A netinstall takes a bit longer, but this way you are sure you have slotted in "the latest and greatest".

Edited November 10, 2005 by scarecrow

[Dustpuppy]

Definitely try something like IceWm - this is a windows manager, so will replace KDE or Gnome on your system. However, you can keep the KDE/Gnome libraries for running individual programmes. Also try adding Rox as a file manager as it's much lighter than things like Konqueror (and rox-pinboard will let you put icons on the backdrop under IceWm).

 

Grab IceWm via urpmi and then logout of KDE/Gnome and then chose to login to IceWm. Configure your files as you want, and off you go!

Edited November 10, 2005 by Dustpuppy

[Guest jglen490]

I have a 266 mhz micron laptop with 128mb of ram.  WAY TO FREAKIN' SLOW for Mandrake.  Any sugestions?  Tried live cds of puppy and dsl, but video is all screwed up (like 1 color, can't read anything)

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

As others have noted, use a lighter GUI (i.e., XFCE4) or any one of a many window managers. I had an older laptop, IBM TP365XD (P120/72MB/3.2GB) that was actually quite happy with Mandrake 9.2 running IceWM. Naturally, I had all the KDE and Gnome libraries so it was easy to pick and choose software to run -- even up to OpenOffice.org. Yours should be real happy running IceWM or any of the other window managers. There's a site where you can get a good prevue of many of the GUI and window managers that are available.

 

You'll be able to install most of them from your Mandriva distro.