On 4/28/05, Walter Dnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 27, 2005 at 12:53:29AM -0400, Colin wrote > > Finally! I have a working install of Linux 2.6.11-gentoo-r6 on a > > Pentium II machine that I plan to use as a portable media center. > > (Think of it as an iPod on steroids.) > > It's probably OK if you intend to run only audio, but video might be a > problem. I finally found an excuse to look for a replacement for my > 1999-vintage Dell (450 mhz PIII with 128 megs of RAM). I find that > mplayer has problems keeping up with 45 kbit/sec "internet TV" streams.
Well, all of the video would be accessed from the hard drive. > You mentioned that your USB is painfully slow. A PII-vintage machine > would not have been built with USB 2. It didn't exist back then. You > have USB 1.1 at best, i.e. just over 1 megabyte/second. You're *NOT* > going to get faster speeds by changing the filesystem on the key or > media. The main bottleneck is your old USB hardware. The PII probably > would have problems keeping up with USB 2 throughput as well. I don't think I ever said "painfully slow," but yes, my motherboard does have USB 1.1 but I do have a USB 2.0 PCI card. Some of my devices are USB 2.0, but they're just a USB key, a flash media reader (AFT PRO-9) and sometimes a USB-Ethernet adapter. Coupled with a USB 1.1 Bluetooth adapter, it's nothing I should concern myself with. My Pentium II is the last of its line, being the 450 MHz version (and overclocked to a stable 504 MHz), but I haven't noticed any CPU bottlenecks. It sure is better than the 200 MHz Pentium-MMX I had before, about on par with that K6-2 I had at first before that mysteriously died during a routing emerge --sync. I can always try to drop in a Slot 1 or slocketed-S370 PIII at any time if I feel this is too slow, I think my BIOS will support it (though I'll need to recompile since I'm using -march). I'm using -march=pentium2 and a host of other gcc optimizations, so compilation is a bore to sit through but the only real slowness I've got is booting (which I'm fully aware can be fixed by going into ACPI S3 instead of a cold shutdown). Then again, I haven't installed GNOME yet nor actually gotten close to showing audio/video. -- Colin -- [email protected] mailing list
