contemplating migrate to old-hardware distro

[hottdogg]

Hi guys!

currently i'm using slackware 12.0 for my old pc:
pIII slot1 450mhz,256mb ram, graphic tnt2 32mb,

It's slow,even running xfce 4 .
For day-to-day task, it always use the swap significantly
my pc are just not up to par firefox 2, konqueror 3.5, openoffice 2
.
So, i'm thinking about migrating to old hardware friendly linux distro that's quite up-to-date at least doesn't have problem with usb, at least gcc 3 , modest gui, vanilla kernel friendly (like slackware! yay! lol )and has some community to support. Don't want an old-hardware-friendly-but-obscure-linux distro either.

Any distro suggestion?
tnx

[blackbelt_jones]

You might want to consider Vector Linux (http://www.vectorlinux.com/mod.php?mod=userpage&menu=9&page_id=2) Gold Standard. It's based on Slackware and xfce, and it's supposed to be optimized for older hardware. I've used the SoHo edition of Vector Linux, which is based on KDE on my PIII and been impressed by the responsiveness, but the Gold Standard edition is supposed to be a lot faster and lighter. Check out the relative hardware requirements:

Standard Edition: Pentium 200 or better, 96MB RAM, 2.1GB hard drive space for system only, more for your data.

SOHO Edition: Pentium 750 or better, 256MB RAM minimum, 3.1GB hard drive space for system only, more for your data, video and monitor capable of 1024x768 resolution at 24 bits colour.

[ph34r]

You could probably double the amount of RAM in that thing for $10...

Heck, assuming it needs PC100, I think I've got some 356mb sticks of it...

[blackbelt_jones]

If you don't have the space for Ram, and you've only got one harddrive, adding a second harddrive can boost performance noticably by creating a second swap partition.

Since posting my first reply, I was impressed enough about what I learned to try replacing Vector Linux Soho with Vector Standard Gold (not called "Gold Standard" as I'd earlier thought).

It's really fast, but while I can live without KDE (I'm a fluxbox man) I just can't seem to get by without Konqueror (or possibly Dolphin) so I'm trying to install kde-base through slapt-get. For that I need to compile Qt, which I'm doing right now. It's a big-*** compile. It's been building for around three hours now-- but it's been pretty smooth. Except for the fact that I'm supposed to type "gmake" and "install gmake" instead of just "make" and "install make", it's been standard procedure up to this point.

I guess the question here is: if I install KDE on the lightweight xfce version of vector Linux, am I back where I started four hours ago when I was running the SoHo (KDE-based)version of Vector Linux. I have no idea.

[panther3e]

You might want to give absolute linux a look see. It is based on slackware and uses icewm. It will work very well on your hardware. I have it running on hardware close to yours.

[rdeschene2]

As a reference point, the PC I use at home is a P-III 550MHz, with 512MB RAM and a HD running at 5400rpm, 12msec seek time, 16MB cache. Video is an ATI Mobility M3 AGP (2x), Dell Latitude C600 laptop. It's very usable. Actually using this laptop with Linux is much less frustrating than using a 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM model running Windows at my employer's. It's just much more responsive and allows true multi-tasking (i.e. copying large directories over the network AND doing online transactions with a spreadsheet open at the same time). Strange but true.

Upgrading the hard drive to a fasterHD with more cache made a significant improvement in performance, as did going from 256MB to 512MB RAM. An nVidia video card with more video RAM would likely help too, as the difference in RAM speeds at that time (video vs system) was pretty large. Might be worthwhile to try different video modules and/or module editions.

[hottdogg]

Just fyi,
for hardware thing,
this pc was 64mb ram, graphic voodoo banshee 16mb,
currently i don't have plan for another upgrading,
so I think I just keep this pc as it is.
I plan to buy new pc early next year anyway...saving some money... :D

my experience with vector linux years ago was that vector installer wasn't as flexible as slackware for the partition configuration, don't know for current vector...

absolute linux seems interesting but still beta...
i'll keep watching for the final release.

what about zenwalk? any comments from zenwalk users ?


If you don't have the space for Ram, and you've only got one harddrive, adding a second harddrive can boost performance noticably by creating a second swap partition.

as a matter fact I use 2 hdds.
my root and home partition in /dev/hdb1 and /dev/hdb5 respectively.
my swap in /dev/hda3.
i wonder if i were using 1 hdd for all my slackware partition, it might be slower... :eek:

Might be worthwhile to try different video modules and/or module editions.
what is this mean?
you mean using nvidia driver?
currently my slackware still uses vesa allocating 4 mb mem :rolleyes:
i'm planning to use nvidia linux driver though, if my own-compiled kernel working well, to see what happen...

in the meantime still fixing my customized kernel... :D