[PLUG] Small distros for older machines

[Rogan Creswick]

On 5/28/07, Steve D... <blitters at gmail.com> wrote:
>   I tried installing the "lite" option for a couple of full size
> distros.  It didn't work very well.  The machine would boot and run,
> but would screw themselves into the ground from race conditions in the
> GUI.  Gnome and KDE run very poorly in a cycle-starved condition.

It's becoming a little known secret that the desktop manager / window
manager has absolutely nothing to do with the distribution,
particularly with "lite" installs.  It's  really not difficult to
install a lighter window manager.  They work quite well, too.
(blackbox, openbox, afterstep, window maker, and yes, even
Enlightenment, all run much faster than gnome / kde these days.)

> I finally ended up installing the Xfce version of Ubuntu, Xubuntu.
>   It's still a bit heavy-weight for a little machine like a Dell 3500,
> but it runs OK.  The good software support makes up for the poor
> performance.

Make sure everything in the "services" list is disabled, and/or run
through /etc/rcS.d and rcN.d (where N is your default runlevel,
probably 2,3 or 5) and disable everything you aren't using.

Xubuntu-desktop runs something called "gam_server" that (I think?) has
to do with disk monitoring for some indexed search tool.  Occasionally
it will suck up a good 80-90% of my cpu, and it's always sitting there
at 6-10%.  If you find a way to turn that off, I'd suggest doing so.
(and please tell me if you do ;).

"fasterfox" is probably worth looking into too -- it's an optimized
build of firefox for Linux.  I'm going to give it a shot at some
point, and I'll report back.

--Rogan