On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Tom Laurie wrote:
> I have now set up two Linux boxes; a server and a desktop on identical
> Pentium 166s with 32 MB of ram.
>
> I was very impressed with just about everything about the server: Apache,
> database, ssh, etc... I was less impressed with the desktop.
Graphical application software tends to be one of the most resource
intensive things you can ask a computer to do. It requires extensive storage
(both memory and disk) for the graphics; CPU time to process the many
transformations needed to make all that useful; and I/O bandwidth to transfer
everything around. It impacts all the major subsystems in a computer, and a
bottleneck anywhere will slow the whole system down. While it is possible to
make an older system into an acceptable GUI workstation, you will have to make
some sacrifices.
> I loaded a standard Red Hat 6.2 desktop installation. I then made sure
> that not needed services were not running. I downloaded and installed
> Star Office.
Unfortunately for your case, most current Linux distributions, Red Hat 6.2
included, contain the latest and greatest GUI software for Linux, targeted at
the "modern" computer desktop machine -- which you do not have. You will have
to tune the system configuration to be more appropriate for your particular
hardware.
To start with, you will definitely want to pick a different window manager.
The default GNOME install (which RHL 6.2 uses) uses the Enlightenment WM,
which is basically bloated-by-design. For your system, I'd recommend TWM,
which is very minimalist, and pre-configured with Red Hat.
In fact, I'd really recommend you drop GNOME (or KDE, for that matter) for a
more traditional Unix/X11 desktop. You lose all the nifty bells, whistles and
gongs that GNOME (or KDE) include, but you gain speed and functionality.
Unfortunately, doing that is really beyond the scope of an email.
> It takes almost a minute for Star Office to come up.
Star Office is probably the worst application you could choose to run on
that system. Star Office is slow on my PC at work -- a 550 MHz Pentium III
with 128 MB of RAM.
What are you looking to do? Someone here can probably recommend an older,
less-flash-more-substance solution that will do what you want.
--
Ben Scott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
| The opinions expressed in this message are those of the author and do not |
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| organization. All information is provided without warranty of any kind. |
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