Suggestions.
Jonathan Hutchins
hutchins at tarcanfel.org
Wed Apr 23 01:33:20 CDT 2003
Quoting Chris Wagner <ismgr at atchisonkansas.net>:
> I need suggestions on the best distribution to run on older hardware
> (talking P1 or K6-2 at best).
> I have a bunch of parts in my garage that I want to use to piece together a
> box to serve at home with, but I need to be able to run a fairly new
> version, if at all possible.
Part of this depends on your hard drive space. I ran RH6.2 for a long time
because it fit on a <2G disk. I finally upgraded to a very lean 7.2, and
ended up having to add a second disk because the log files kept filling up
what little space remained.
That said, there have been excellent improvements in the post 8 releases of
Mandrake and RedHat for their speed and efficiency running GUI on older
systems. I'm running Mandrake 9.1 on a K6/2 550 right now (might be
underclocked at 500, I'm not sure), with 256M RAM, and performance is
satisfactory. Launching programs under KDE is a little slow (even off of a
7200RPM disk), but they respond reasonably well once they're up.
Audio playback has "artifacts" if I do other things while it's running, but I
have done NOTHING to optimize it yet, just barely enabled it. Video playback
is very good, but can bog down if I'm doing other tasks at the same time.
I would say that 9.1 is competitive with W95 for performance. Programs open
much slower, but respond at least as well, and while MP3 playback isn't as
reliable, I get can do full screen video if I single task, which I can't under
Windows.
If you have a reasonable life expectancy and don't need your machine for a
week or so, you could install gentoo, and everythign would be compiled
specificly for your system and run very efficiently.
---------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through tarcanfel's horde/imp system
More information about the Kclug
mailing list