Re: Red Hat On Yesterday's Hardware

[Florin Andrei <florin sgi com>]

On Sat, 2003-06-28 at 21:15, Robert L Cochran wrote:
> I see from the release notes for Red Hat 9 that the minimum CPU is a
> Pentium class and the minumum memory is 64 Mb, rock bottom. 
> My question is, what is the lowest-end system that one can get
> realistically decent graphics performance from with Red Hat 9? Including
> internetting and office management tasks? A Pentium 90? Pentium 66? How
> low can I go before the hardware chokes the OS performance-wise? 

It depends a lot on the apps you're using. There's no definite answer in
general.

I do have a PII/233 96MB RAM laptop, on which the default RH environment
is waaay too slow.
One thing i did was to replace Gnome with Fluxbox.
Another one was to boot in runlevel 3 and use X only when needed.
I also used prelink to accelerate the apps.
Also, stripping all the binaries helps.
Another one: compile the critical apps with higher gcc optimizations
(but be careful to not "overoptimize" them).
Also, use memory-saving apps, such as Galeon or Firebird instead of
Mozilla, AbiWord instead of OO Writer, Gnumeric instead of OO Calc, etc.
And of course, the basics: don't install what you don't need, turn off
all unnecessary services, etc.

That being said, i quit using Red Hat on that system. I installed Gentoo
:-) and it seems like that's a better choice on that particular machine.

-- 
Florin Andrei

"Never send a human to do a machine's job." - Agent Smith