At 08:49 PM 07/09/2002 -0500, Harmon Seaver wrote: >On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 03:17:52PM -0400, Sunder wrote: > > Sure, you can revive old hardware with Linux, but you'll find it runs KDE > > 3.0 or GNOME slower than windows 95 did on the same hardware. So unless > > you're willing to also go to older software (or at least less demanding > > software) you've still got a useless machine. > > What? Your brand of crack must be particularly poor these days. A 200mhz >cyrix cpu runs linux w/gnome fast enough for most anything. Slower than >w95??? Come again? I've run 1ghz boxes and they really don't surf the net much >faster, so what's your point?
The big issue tends to be memory rather than CPU speed - while Linux isn't quite the bloatware that Windows is, you *really* don't want to run GNOME with the default window manager on a P66 with 16MB RAM. Trust me, you don't :-) Works just fine with TWM or other lightweight window managers. You also wouldn't want to run current IE / Netscape 6 on it, though Netscape 4.7x worked fast enough. If your box can support current PC100 / PC133 SIMMs, you can probably upgrade it with enough memory to run the newer applications ok, but the generation of machines with Fast Page Mode 72-pin memory tends to be limited to 32MB or sometimes less, and 386s tend to be 8MB.
