[PLUG] linux on 166?

Anthony Schlemmer aschlemm at attbi.com
Mon May 6 06:51:57 UTC 2002


I don't know if you saw my earlier post but I did a test update of a 
SuSE 7.2 system to SuSE 8.0 on a Pentium Pro 200 system with 128MB of 
memory. I'm not sure I would recommend trying to use KDE3 on a 166 
system. I found KDE3 very slow starting up on the PPro 200 system. My 
primary workstation is a 900MHZ Athlon and so I guess I'm used to 
better performance now and have forgotten how slow that PPro 200 system 
is when I used it as my primary workstation.

If you stick to a light weight window manager it is certainly possible 
to run an X-based Linux system on rather meager hardware. I used to run 
Slackware on a 486/33 with 32MB of memory. I used the OpenLook Virtual 
Window Manager "olvwm" and the system had sufficient resources to run 
both Netscape and XEmacs simultaneously and performance wasn't real 
bad. It did take some time to load those large apps but once they were 
running performance was quite acceptable.

YMMV,

Tony 

On Sunday 05 May 2002 23:19 pm, Craig wrote:
> My 166MMX is happily running Mandrake Security.  It has been a long
> time since it has run anything else.  I would like to hear from
> anyone with personal experience running a new distro on an old
> Pentium.  Is KDE 3.0 going to be possible?  Anyone like any lighter
> desktop?  I would particularly like to hear from people who use both
> a modern machine and an older one.  I remember being fairly well
> satisfied with SuSE 6.4 on the box, but after using a 600 for a while
> that 166 has become painful.
>
> Mainly I'm interested in browsers, email and basic document handling,
> but the key is mom and dad level ease of use and reliability, so pine
> and lynx won't cut it.  Before I blow my firewall's uptime by testing
> a bunch of configs and distros with it, I thought someone here might
> have some experience and point me in the right direction.  By the
> way, Spanish language support would be nice.
>
> Thank you,
> Craig
>
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-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at attbi.com






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