Say I wanted to load a Linus OS on a Pentium (not II or III) IBM
Laptop (non-booting Hard Drive) and/or an HP with oh I think its a
PIII running under 900Mhz, then wouldn't I want to seek out the
smaller distributions; those with less bells and whistles perhaps but
still able to recognize video chipsets and bioses, right?

As I write this I'm wondering if any one has ever produced an overlap
table of best fits between eras of processors vs a given family
version of Linux flavors?


TBerk

On May 4, 8:20 pm, TBerk <bayareab...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Say I wanted to load a Linus OS on a Pentium (not II or III) IBM
> Laptop (non-booting Hard Drive) and/or an HP with oh I think its a
> PIII running under 900Mhz, then wouldn't I want to seek out the
> smaller distributions; those with less bells and whistles perhaps but
> still able to recognize video chipsets and bioses, right?

There is little point to most of the tiny / light distros. Just chose
a mainstream distro (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian) and do a minimal
install.

I run openSUSE on 900MHz vintage machines without any issues.

> As I write this I'm wondering if any one has ever produced an overlap
> table of best fits between eras of processors vs a given family
> version of Linux flavors?

whitemice <adamtaunowilliams@gmail.com> wrote:
> There is little point to most of the tiny / light distros. Just chose
> a mainstream distro (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian) and do a minimal
> install.
>
> I run openSUSE on 900MHz vintage machines without any issues.

I run Debian on Pentium 120 desktop machines and vintage laptops, again
there are no problems. (I think my laptop is a Pentium II 750MHz
Toshiba, with ATI Rage graphics chipset.)

I would choose a laptop with an ATI Radeon or ATI Rage based video
chipset (compatible with open source drivers), to display 3d graphics.

Regards,

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley,
393 Quinton Road West,
Quinton, BIRMINGHAM.
B32 1QE.

On Sun, 04 May 2008 17:20:12 -0700, TBerk wrote:

> Say I wanted to load a Linus OS on a Pentium (not II or III) IBM Laptop
> (non-booting Hard Drive) and/or an HP with oh I think its a PIII running
> under 900Mhz, then wouldn't I want to seek out the smaller
> distributions; those with less bells and whistles perhaps but still able
> to recognize video chipsets and bioses, right?
>
> As I write this I'm wondering if any one has ever produced an overlap
> table of best fits between eras of processors vs a given family version
> of Linux flavors?
>
>
> TBerk

How much memory do you have? Memory size is much more important than
processor speed. I have Fedora 8 on an old 500MHz 384M laptop and its
usable as long as you only run one application at a time, if you try and
do more than that you get paging. 512M would be much more comfortable, a
500MHz 512M machine would work fine. BTW Fedora has been getting faster
with each release so I'd recommend F8 or F9. Also I was trying out the
latest Ubuntu, 8.0.4, on my test machine yesterday. Ubuntu felt
noticeable slower than Fedora 8 or 9. I'm not sure why that is because
it's using the same version of Gnome as F9. My test machine has a lot of
memory (3G) and a reasonably fast processor (single core 2.4GHz A64), the
only thing that's weak is the graphics processor which is an onboard
Nvidia G6150 but I disabled the 3D effects which are on by default in
Ubuntu but that didn't help. But bottom line Fedora for whatever reason
is definitely faster than Ubuntu so I'd go with Fedora 8 if I were you
(Fedora 9 is still a beta).

OK, so later versions (with better support & drivers, natch) and
minimal install is a better fit than matching Old Versions & Old
Hardware.


Got it, Thx.

TBerk

On Mon, 05 May 2008 11:23:04 -0700, TBerk wrote:

> OK, so later versions (with better support & drivers, natch) and minimal
> install is a better fit than matching Old Versions & Old Hardware.
>
>
> Got it, Thx.
>
> TBerk

Old distros are a last last resort. If you have a reasonable amount of
memory, i.e. 384M or better, then you can run Fedora 8 or 9 with Gnome
and it will work fine. If you have less than that you want to consider
other alternatives. There are light weight window managers that require
less memory than Gnome or KDE. You will need a distro that has good
support for them, Fedora isn't it. Although Fedora has a lot of light
weight Window managers, WindowMaker, blackbox, fluxbox, icewm, fvvm, they
don't work very well. When I was setting up my 384M 500MHz laptop I tried
all of them. What I found was that they were pretty close to useless out
of the box. They aren't maintained by anyone so they tend to be set up
either for some system other than Fedora or for some historical version
of Redhat, i.e. there are applications listed that haven't been used for
years while the modern equivalents of those apps aren't listed. I also
found that the performance wasn't significantly better than Gnome. On
that box I found that using Gnome and turning off all of the unnecessary
services and daemons yielded a pretty decent result. The Ubuntu people
have a version called Xbuntu that uses a light weight window manager, I
think its fvvm. I haven't tried it but I suspect that it would be much
better than Fedora with FVVM because they are treating Xbuntu as a real
distro.

For really pathetic machines there are distros like Damn Small Linux that
are tuned for them. You won't get the modern Linux experience with DSL or
it's ilk but you will get a workable system.

General Schvantzkopf wrote:

> On Mon, 05 May 2008 11:23:04 -0700, TBerk wrote:
>
>> OK, so later versions (with better support & drivers, natch) and minimal
>> install is a better fit than matching Old Versions & Old Hardware.
>>
> [...] The Ubuntu people have a version called Xbuntu that uses a light
> weight window manager, I think its fvvm.

No, it's XFCE 4.0. Less features than KDE or Gnome, but lightweight and
fairly fast. Better looking than /fvwm/ too, although not my personal
favorite. ;-)

> I haven't tried it but I suspect that it would be much better than Fedora
> with FVVM because they are treating Xbuntu as a real distro.

Indeed, XFCE is much better integrated with Xubuntu than in distros that put
the emphasis on KDE or Gnome. Mandriva may be an exception because they
always sought to offer the best integration no matter what desktop
environment you use.

My beef with RedHat/CentOS/Fedora is that they try to be nannies during
installation. If you attempt to install them on a system that has
either /reiserfs/ or /xfs/ partitions on them, it will recognize the
partitions but it will disallow you to mount them anywhere in the regular
directory tree.

If you don't have either of those filesystems on your hard disk, you won't
even be able to create /reiserfs,/ /xfs/ or /jfs/ for that matter. The
only option is /ext3,/ possibly also still /ext2./

> For really pathetic machines there are distros like Damn Small Linux that
> are tuned for them. You won't get the modern Linux experience with DSL or
> it's ilk but you will get a workable system.

VectorLinux is also rumored to be quite fast and lightweight. It's based
upon Slackware. And if the OP is brave enough and/or experienced enough,
he could try Gentoo.

It allows one to tailor the software to one's specific needs, e.g. if you
want to (re)compile a package without KDE support, then you can do so and
make the software slimmer. It's all controlled by the USE flags.

Your mileage may vary... ;-)

--
*Aragorn*
(registered GNU/Linux user #223157)

On Sun, 04 May 2008 17:20:12 -0700, TBerk wrote:

> Say I wanted to load a Linus OS on a Pentium (not II or III) IBM Laptop
> (non-booting Hard Drive) and/or an HP with oh I think its a PIII running
> under 900Mhz, then wouldn't I want to seek out the smaller
> distributions; those with less bells and whistles perhaps but still able
> to recognize video chipsets and bioses, right?
>
> As I write this I'm wondering if any one has ever produced an overlap
> table of best fits between eras of processors vs a given family version
> of Linux flavors?

The real resource hog in Linux as with any OS is the GUI. Linux, new or
old, without a GUI will fly on just about system, new or old. So, if you
want or need a GUI, look for a very lightweight one. Really all you need
is a window manager like IceWM or FVWM to run X apps. KDE, GNOME and
XFCE are window ENVIRONMENTS with lots of resource eating bells and
whistles. But....

As an example: I custom installed app by app, utility by utility, etc.
Debian 4.0 Etch and XFCE on a 7 or 8 year old IBM Thinkpad 240X with a
500Mhz CPU and 192MB RAM. Even on battery, when the CPU speed is reduced
to 166MHz to lengthen battery life, it runs just fine even with several
apps open. However, if you're looking for a distro that is designed
specifically for running on older systems, I suggest:

Vector (http://www.vectorlinux.com),
Puppy (http://puppylinux.com),
Damn Small Linux (http:www.damnsmalllinux.org),
TinyME (http://www.mypclinuxos.com/doku.php/tinyme:home).


Stef

On Sun, 04 May 2008 17:20:12 -0700, TBerk wrote:

> Say I wanted to load a Linus OS on a Pentium (not II or III) IBM Laptop
> (non-booting Hard Drive) and/or an HP with oh I think its a PIII running
> under 900Mhz, then wouldn't I want to seek out the smaller
> distributions; those with less bells and whistles perhaps but still able
> to recognize video chipsets and bioses, right?
>
> As I write this I'm wondering if any one has ever produced an overlap
> table of best fits between eras of processors vs a given family version
> of Linux flavors?

The real resource hog in Linux as with any OS is the GUI. Linux, new or
old, without a GUI will fly on just about system, new or old. So, if you
want or need a GUI, look for a very lightweight one. Really all you need
is a window manager like IceWM or FVWM to run X apps. KDE, GNOME and
XFCE are window ENVIRONMENTS with lots of resource eating bells and
whistles. But....

As an example: I custom installed app by app, utility by utility, etc.
Debian 4.0 Etch and XFCE on a 7 or 8 year old IBM Thinkpad 240X with a
500Mhz CPU and 192MB RAM. Even on battery, when the CPU speed is reduced
to 166MHz to lengthen battery life, it runs just fine even with several
apps open. However, if you're looking for a distro that is designed
specifically for running on older systems, I suggest:

Vector (http://www.vectorlinux.com),
Puppy (http://puppylinux.com),
Damn Small Linux (http:www.damnsmalllinux.org),
TinyME (http://www.mypclinuxos.com/doku.php/tinyme:home).


Stef

On May 5, 7:35*pm, Stefan Patric <toot...@yahoo.com> wrote:
<snip>
> *However, if you're looking for a distro that is designed
> specifically for running on older systems, I suggest:
>
> * Vector (http://www.vectorlinux.com),
> * Puppy (http://puppylinux.com),
> * Damn Small Linux (http:www.damnsmalllinux.org),
> * TinyME (http://www.mypclinuxos.com/doku.php/tinyme:home).
>
> Stef

OK, Thx every Part II.

I started a download of kubuntu this afternoon and after I came home,
I found 714 thousand thousand bytes of Linux-y goodness on the hard
drive.

I'll be burning it to a CD, creating a boot floppy, all that kind of
fun stuff.

When/If I get anything actually done I'll report back.


TBerk