On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 04:30:58PM -0600, Telly Williams wrote: > How's everyone? > > I'm about to install Debian (with Gnome) on an HP Pavilion 6360 for > my friend's mother. The HP takes a maximum of 256MB's of ram. > Originally I was going to re-install Windows XP for her, but that > doesn't look like a good idea from a SPEED perspective (it was going > incredibly slow when I obtained it from her). well, definitely OT, but from a speed perspective, my wife's well maintained (by me) XP box runs about the same responsiveness with etch/gnome as with XP. But in both environments its swapping with 256MB. If the thing was really running slow, I'd suspect spyware/crapware as the cause of that. Xp is reasonably well mannered at 256MB. > > I wanted to get an opinion from someone on whether or not this will > run well or not for her. I personally think that it will, based on the > documentation I've read about the very old computers that can be used > with Linux, but I wanted to get a second thought. This is definitely true, you can configure some pretty snappy systems with linux, but gnome/kde is not the way to do it. I recommend you install XFCE as it will give a fairly full experience without the baggage of the bigger DE's. I'm contemplating doing that to my wife's machine now that I've made her switch all the way away from XP. I run XFCE on my desktop and was stuck at 256 for a long time. It would swap, but not too much and was definitely better than XP. Some will complain of XFCE memory leaks, but I've not really seen it (sid). ymmv, but you'll get more m with a lighter desktop or more memory. A
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