Re: An old box running Debian 8
On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 05:40:50PM +0100, Miroslav Skoric wrote:
> I have an old comp (CPU Pentium II Celeron 400 MHz, 224 MB RAM) running ham
> radio server in Debian 8. It works well in CLI, but very slow after starting
> GUI. I wonder whether it would be worth to try (if possible at all) to
> upgrade it to Debian 9. Any experience with such old boxes?
Upgrading to a newer release is not likely to make it faster. If anything,
it'll be slower (due to increased memory demands of newer software).
It's also worth noting that Debian 8->9 has a huge change to X and video
drivers. Lots of chipsets are supported *differently* in Debian 9 than
they were in previous versions. Whether that's good or bad will depend
on the chipset. Some chipsets may have lost support altogether.
At this point, your system is quite old, and you should not expect it to
last forever. Even if the software works perfectly, the hardware is
eventually going to fail. You might want to get ahead of that by buying
something less ancient. You might even save on electricity by doing this.
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