Re: Red Hat On Yesterday's Hardware

[Michael Fratoni <mfratoni tuxfan homeip net>]

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On Sunday 29 June 2003 10:10 am, Gordon Pritchard wrote:

> 	I ran a P-166/64MB with RH8.  Out-of-the-box, it was very slow doing
> anything in X (1024x768, 16bpp).  I was not happy with it (but that
> unhappiness ultimately led to a new machine :-) ).
>
> 	The only way I could get reasonable performance was to change
> window-managers.  First, I tried the very-minimalist one that was
> included (twm???).  Later, I installed and tried iceWM.  Now, I was
> happy with iceWM:  the machine seemed snappy and responsive.
>
> 	I never tried it with office-type apps, but browsing (Galeon was my
> choice, after watching system-resource-consumption with alternatives)
> was fine.  I also used a number of ham-radio applications, and they too
> were fine (but not graphically-intensive).
>
> 	So, my bottom-line suggestion is that X and in particular the WM will
> dictate largely how satisfied you will be.  Out-of-the-box, I don't
> think RH9 is very usable on the low-end Pentium stuff you're
> suggesting, for the apps you're considering.

Using the RULE projects "Slinky" installer for Red Hat 9, adding the 
XFree86 "TinyX" servers with the icewm window manager, even older 
hardware can be reasonably fast. I have a P100 laptop with 40M of RAM 
running TinyX. It's reasonably useful. Start up time from entering startx 
to the window manager loading is less than 10 seconds.
Screenshots here:
http://www.rule-project.org/en/screenshots.php

http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/rule/slinky/slinky-v0.3.95/
http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/rule/XFree86/icewm-1.2.7-5RULE.i386.rpm
http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/rule/XFree86/icewm-themes-1.2.7-5RULE.i386.rpm
http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/rule/XFree86/kdrive/9/XFree86-TinyX-4.3.0-5RULE.i386.rpm

The rpm packages above are all contained in the rule-${version}.iso. (as 
well as an i386 kernel package) Additionally, the installer sets up X to 
use the TinyX 'Xvesa' server and use icewm as the default window manager.

http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/rule/slinky/slinky-v0.3.95/slinky-v0.3.95.iso

- -- 
- -Michael

pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.{2,3}|8.0 in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/en/
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