Howard Gibson <hgibson-MwcKTmeKVNQ at public.gmane.org> writes:
On Sun, 17 Aug 2003 21:47:32 -0400 Chris Aitken <aitken-BwLjziHGQLusTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
I have an acer p166 (64 MB RAM, awe32 sound card, trio s3 virge video card) which my daughter has been using for WordPerfect 8, MSN (gaim), music CDs and Internet. It had RH 7.3 and ran a little slow. I upgraded it to 8.0 to see just how slow it would run - and, ya, it was *too* slow. I think the hardware is better suited to RH 6.2. That went on easily and everything seems a little faster. However, I can see I'll have to a lot of mucking around - no gaim, so I'll have to find something else that will run MSN, it liked my sound card but then announced that I'll have to compile sound support into the kernel, printing already gave me a little trouble. Problem is is that this is not a test/learning machine - this is my daughter's machine. I don't want to tell her she has to be off it for days and days while I learn about makefile, compiling the kernel (for the first time), etc. So, my question is: Is Rh 6.2 going to so much faster on this machine that's it's going to be worth my daughter being without a computer for a month while I try to get it to do what 7.3 will do right out of the box?
Please, spare the other hundreds of people on the list, the "Gee, Chris, I know the answer to your problem - it's called Windows - embrace the Beaast." comments - or at least send it offline - thanks.
Chris
Chris,
I have just upgraded my P233 laptop to Red Hat 8. I have 64MB of RAM, and it too is running slowly. Definitely, I am into swap, so my second strategy for speeding things up is more RAM.
More RAM will definitely help.
My first strategy for speeding things up is to run FVWM2 instead of Gnome or KDE. There are a couple of other small window managers out there, but I have a long history with FVWM. There are a couple of other FVWM freaks in this user group, so you can get help.
There was some talk about running an FVWM demo at one of the user meetings. Is there any more interest in this?
Consider xfce4 instead. It's a lightweight, functional desktop, reminiscent of CDE. RAM hungry apps like OpenOffice or Mozilla will still be unwieldy (without a RAM upgrade) but you can run a decent desktop on this machine if you choose your components carefully. Debian is arguably a better choice for a low power machine as you have far more ready made packages to choose from; thus, you can better experiment with tradoffs between footprint and functionality. Be prepared, however, to spend a good bit of time customizing it to your liking. -- tim writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> starnix inc. tollfree: 1-87-pro-linux thornhill, ontario, canada http://www.starnix.com professional linux services & products -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml