Re: [MLUG] Linux on laptops

[Sorin Toma]

On 12/15/2011 05:46 PM, Nelson Asinowski wrote: Hi I am looking at other peoples experience with Linux on laptops. I am looking for practical minimum specs for reasonable performance.  I have a reputation for build Frankenputers.  Every computer in the house right now (3 actively used windows XP desktops, 2 window XP laptops, I have over the last month have done two tests. One with Puppy Linux and with Fedora. Puppy is installed on 1.3 G Hz Pentium M  with 512 Meg of memory with a 30 G hard-disk. (IBM T40). The distro was Lupu 5.2.8 which is a reduced Ubuntu distro.  Fedora is installed on a 1.5 G Hz Pentium M with 512 Meg of memory and an 80g hard disk. It a Toshiba Tablet convertible Protege M200. The distro was the Live Fedora 13 installed to a hard disk. In the puppy case I did a funky usb stick install.  The boot starts from one stick and the saved state is saved to another stick.  This is a feature of Puppy as it is designed to have a support for a install that does not disturb an existing OS.  The typical case would be to boot from the live CD and save a 1.25G Squash FS partition on the host OS's files system (e.g. NTFS  under windows). The business with usb was me tinkering.   For a performance boost I used gparted to shrink the NTFS partition so I could create a Linux swap partition.  Puppy searches for it on boot up and uses it as needed.  I gave it about 1/2 a Gig but it can use more to manage the SFS.  It auto saves to the SFS on the stick periodically. Performance was fine on this system. Could have 10 web pages tabs open in firefox (3.6.24), a file manage (Tux Commander or Rox filer) and edit word docs (Abiword). The only slow down was the auto save dominated the system every 10 minutes or so for 10 - 15 seconds. I am writing this on the Fedora system.  I have be using it for only two days is is an early opinion.  I don't see the system responding really crisply to mouse clicks. I put the task bar panel on the left side with auto hide (I do the same thing under windows). Under the stress of some other disk intensive activity, the task bar leaves graphical debris on the screen for a few seconds until it catches up with itself.  (I can get windows to do similar things too) Web 2.0 apps work ok.  I am using yahoo mail and I used a on-line PDF editor (PDFEscape). I will know more over the next week because I have contract that requires it so I am learning its features and foibles. Other experiences???? Nelson Asinowski 514-685-6848 nelson_asinow...@yahoo.com Hello, My main working laptop is an HP EliteBook 6930p (core2duo 2.4GHz, 4GB ram, 750GB hdd) with Mageia 1.0 I also have my old P4M 1,4GHz (made from an Uniwill barebone, 2GB ram and 160Gb hdd) running Mandriva 2010.2,  a Dell Latitude (P!!! 1200MHz with 1GB ram) running also Mandriva 2010, a Hp Mini 210, 4GB ram with Mageia 1.0 and a really old Compaq M700 (P!!! 700MHz, 512MB ram) with Mandriva 2008.2 - all of those uses KDE (version 3.7 on the old Compaq) I also have an Acer Aspire One that I've just switched to USB, because I've ripped the SATA connector That I've soldered a year ago on the motherboard and I'm not going to pay 40$ for an 8GB 1.5in PATA SSD - this one is running miniKnoppix with some tweaks and uses LXDE - incredibly snappy even with compiz activated! As a side-note: My server uses a sort of LFS and has the / partition on an 1GB USB flash  (Fluxbox over VNC for the lazy admin here) and the media center is running a slimmed down Mandriva 2010.2 with XBMC as default DE. -- Best Regards, Sorin Toma

_______________________________________________
mlug mailing list
mlug@listserv.mlug.ca
https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca