On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 20:28:49 -0700 (PDT) Carlos <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > i'm recently thinking of migrating all the > workstations in a school computer laboratory to > linux... the specs of the comps are 500mhz celeron, 64 > mb ram... 8 gig harddrive. i've tried mdk.. suse... > lycoris... redhat.. even slackware.. but they all > crawl in the comps.. kahit yung simple lang na window > manager ang gamit ko. are there anymore distro's you > people could suggest for such slow computers??
A nice thing about most Linux systems is that you can make use of old hardware. For example, there's a PII 350 box here on 256 megs of RAM that runs as a web server, SMB server, mail server, gateway, firewall/router, and DB server for our dorm network. It runs RH7.2 and I've never had any big problems with it. But for desktop machines, it's a slightly different story. Of course, modern applications like Evolution and OpenOffice.org will expect newer, better hardware, and most new distros as a whole do too; the kernel and system themselves need some beef. So IMO, you should make a custom install of some good, flexible system like Gentoo or Debian. Gentoo's portage allows you to optimize your binaries for your system, making full use of what you have. Kernel customizations will help too. Instead of Gnome or KDE, use XFCE or blackbox (the best for efficiency). Use abiword instead of OpenOffice or KOffice. Use Sylpheed instead of big, fat Evolution. Don't run unnecessary daemons like MySQL if they're not needed. (User distros like Mandrake install some by default.) There are a lot of applications that run really well on old hardware. You just have to find them. In general, choose GTK 1.x apps instead of the fancier, newer ones on GTK 2. Some apps, like abiword, gqview, and Mozilla Firefox, will allow you to choose the GTK 1 toolkit for speed. Hope this helps. -- Paolo Vanni M. Ve�egas Ateneo Campus Network Group (AteneoCNG) 4 BSCS, Ateneo de Manila University http://cng.ateneo.net/cng/pvenegas -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
