RFC: Optimizing for 386

[Iago Rubio]

On Wed, 2005-01-19 at 23:16, Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:

> Actually, i don't think the CPU is the biggest slowdown for fedora. From
> my personal experience - memory (RAM) is a bigger issue. I have a 200
> mhz pentium 2 running fedora 3, full GUI and everything, and while i
> ain't claiming that it is hyperfast, its certainly usable. It has 384 MB
> of RAM.
> 
> OTOH, i have seen much "stronger" pc's (counting on CPU - from 600 mhz
> to a bit over 1 GHz) with less memory (256 MB or 180 MB) be slow/barely
> usable. Especially when starting up the big memory-eater - OpenOffice.

I've had FC3 running on a p233 with 64 Mb and Gnome, and it was usable
if you avoided to open a huge bunch of X apps at the same time.

Of course I didn't used OO in this box - abiword eats less resources -
and no daemon was runing in the background. 

The system was capable of normal desktop use: surfing the net, using
mail apps, writing docs and such.

I Also tried xfce in this box and it's a bit faster, seems less memory
hungry that Gnome, and better suited for low end machines.

Right now this machine is running RHEL4 beta and Gnome with success.

May be the stop point is not FC3 resources consuming but OO's :)


Best regards.
-- 
Iago Rubio