Linux and old laptop

[TnT]

I may be able to recover an old laptop from my sister and install Linux on it. My question is if the newer GUIs will perform okay on something like a Pentium 200Mhz? In general will I notice the age of the processor while running Linux for programming, web surfing, occasional graphics, etc?

Thanks,
Thien

[TnT]

D'oh forgot Alternative Lifestyles is still around, thought it got combined with this forum.

[Greebe]

Think this one would be better suited/answered in Alt Lifestyles. So off ya go

[bsdgeek]

Use a lighter WM like XFCE. It will run OK on the IBM P133 laptop I've got, so a 200MHz should run better. If you run something like KDE or GNOME, you will notice the difference.

[Steve Snyder]

Re: Linux and old laptop

Originally posted by TnT
I may be able to recover an old laptop from my sister and install Linux on it. My question is if the newer GUIs will perform okay on something like a Pentium 200Mhz? In general will I notice the age of the processor while running Linux for programming, web surfing, occasional graphics, etc?

I think memory issues are more important than how fast the CPU runs. Does this machine have L2 cache? Does it have at least 64MB of sytem RAM?

A Pentium/200 makes a great platform for text-mode Linux, but GUIs, even the stripped down ones, consume a lot of memory. Sure, you could run it with only 32MB of RAM, but you'd hate it.

Other considerations: Does this machine have hardware-accelerated graphics? Is the hard disk capable of DMA transfers? GUIs move a lot of data.

Oh, hell. Just try it. Both the hardware and software are free, so the only cost is a few hours of your time. Let us know how it works out.

[Marshmallowman]

I haven't tried it yet but I have heard fluxbox is an excellent light weight window manager (based on black box)

http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/

apparently it works quite well even on a 486

[jImbEam]

Windowmaker is not bad for a slow computer.

jImbEam

[TnT]

Steve, well I was just leading to that it is a pretty old computer and these newer GUIs look like they'll kill it

Thanks for the suggestions so far, I'll have to check them out.

[merlin262]

I'd stick w/ fvwm or wmaker.

Runs just fine on ye' old 486.

Another one is icewm. On a P200 you could probably run icewm just fine.

Make sure you don't run any services: apache, etc...

Slackware I've found best in situations like this.

And it should run just fine.

I have some K6-2's here running KDE and they handle it pretty good. (A 350Mhz and a 450Mhz) Both are usable without too much frustration.

[Six Of One]

Re: Re: Linux and old laptop

Originally posted by Steve Snyder


I think memory issues are more important than how fast the CPU runs. Does this machine have L2 cache? Does it have at least 64MB of sytem RAM?

A Pentium/200 makes a great platform for text-mode Linux, but GUIs, even the stripped down ones, consume a lot of memory. Sure, you could run it with only 32MB of RAM, but you'd hate it.

Other considerations: Does this machine have hardware-accelerated graphics? Is the hard disk capable of DMA transfers? GUIs move a lot of data.

Oh, hell. Just try it. Both the hardware and software are free, so the only cost is a few hours of your time. Let us know how it works out.

I tend to disagree in your initial statement but like your conclusion ;-) Graphical Linux is working nice (not only "yipiee, it works... well, sort of" but "nice") with 16MB RAM on CPUs as slow as a 486DX with 33MHZ. Just be prepared to forfeit a lot of the fancy stuff. No animated menus and icons, no system sounds, no window content displayed while resizing and "multi-media" will not happen. Basically, a PC that can do MS Windows 3.1 can do Linux with X like a charm. There were good suggestions for a GUI, among them my favorites: Windowmaker if you don't need an integrated Desktop Environment and XFce if you need one but find KDE and GNOME to sluggish and overloaded. BTW, XFce is fully able to use Xinerama (this means we can use our DualHead to display one really big desktop... something KDE and GNOME can't!)

If you have even less RAM, try Black Box or Ion.

But back to the topic. An old Laptop should be fine with Linux, and vice versa. Old hardware is generally good supported in Linux, but it depends on your distro. Mandrake is i686 (Pentium 2 and up) optimized, Red Hat is i586 (Pentium and up) as is SuSE. Debian, Caldera, etc are i386 and run beautifully on all x86 platforms beyond the AT. Debian currently runs on 6 platforms, including PPC, ALPHA and ARM.

Regards