On Saturday 25 September 2004 10:45 pm, Don Jackson wrote:
> I am seeking the advice of some of you who may have been down this path
> before. Situation: I am working on an older 166 MHz Pentium-S machine with
> 96 MB RAM, two 2.5GB hard drives, for a neighbor (rather poor) here in the
> Arkansas Ozarks.
<snip>
> Anyone have any suggestions of what I could do to improve speed within the
> constraints I have mentioned? (Yes, I know that command line email program
> would do wonders, but she needs the GUI.) I don't really need all the
> fancy stuff that the KDE desktop provides. I might mention that Win98se
> with Outlook Express is quite fast (relative to sarge/kde/kmail) on this
> same machine.
I recently installed Sid on a Cyrix 133, 32 meg ram (upgraded from a whopping
16 meg), 2.5G drive machine for a similar situation. I'd installed a Woody
base, then upgraded to Sid via apt-get dist-upgrade (after editing the
apt.sources). I found that it worked pretty well too! Blackbox and xfce4 were
what I tested with, and ended up going with xfce4. Mozilla Firefox and
Mozilla Thunderbird are used for web and email, and some basic tools and
utilities are there as well. Firefox will be slow as snails to start, so
Opera might be a viable alternative. No office suite was included. The
machine is by no means a speed demon, but it's definately usable - and now
has a modern, up to date (and updatable) OS on it. My client is extremely
pleased.
If you're interested in the setup, 2 customized install files, one for
blackbox and a seperate one for xfce4, can be downloaded from:
http://home.twcny.rr.com/blahmustdie/packages.xfce
or
http://home.twcny.rr.com/blahmustdie/packages.blackbox
They're easily installed by doing the following:
1. Make sure your sources are appropriate (not woody), and that apt-get
dist-upgrade has been taken care of if need be. Sarge should work as well as
Sid.
2. command:
dpkg --set-selections < packages.xfce
or
dpkg --set-selections < packages.xfce
3. command:
dselect install
or
apt-get upgrade
4. wait for stuff to be installed
It's a fairly tight setup, around 400 megs.
Note: There's no gui login manager included, but one can be installed if
needed. I set up to where the gui will kick in immediately from a text login
(with linux_logo) by adding the startx command to the user's .bash_profile
and calling the window manager via an .xinitrc file.
This setup, along with a tightly customized kernel, has made for a suprisingly
speedy little machine. Don't expect miracles by any means, but it really is
pleasing how well the machine functions.
Best of luck!
--
...Rob
Return address is obfuscated.
You can reach me via mylaptop (at) twcny dot rr dot com