As a matter of fact, it's possible to run X on a box of these specs and have it run fine. I used to run Red Hat 6.x on a Sony Vaio with a 2.1 Gb disk, Pentium II (mobile) 233, and 64 Meg of RAM, with X and enlightenment+Gnome (at the time considered the biggest resource hog around) and it still felt faster than Windows.
That said, of course, those who are used to newer hardware will find this combination slow now. I have the same laptop running Red Hat 9, and there is a marked performance drop off (upgraded the HDD to 6.4 Gb as the old one was failing). I'd like to try Gentoo on it as I think it's the RH9 deps that slow the thing down. You might try a laptop of this vintage (perhaps even the same model--Sony PCG-505GX http://search.ebay.com/PCG-505GX_W0QQfkrZ1QQfromZR8QQsatitleZPCG-505GX). Linux runs on it well (at least Red Hat 6.x, 7.x, and 9), sound card is supported (old onboard soundblaster), hibernate-to-disk works out of the box (although if you upgrade the hard disk (you should), you'll need elphdisk to create the suspend partition (I can help with that). The other benefit of this particular laptop is its size--3 lbs and less than 1" thick. Nice if you want to take it places without developing a case of compressed vertebrae :) William On Sat, 14 May 2005, Jason Tower wrote: > if you don't need X, a box with a pentium II, 128mb, and a 4 to 6gb disk > is plenty to run a basic LAMP setup. of course, it won't be blazing > fast and your storage capacity will be limited but enough to get you > started. > > i have a couple of older laptop lying around that meet those specs, ping > me offline if you're interested. > > jason > > matt-nc wrote: > > I'm thinking about getting a laptop that would run current versions of > > Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP so I could work on learning those things at > > a library. > > > > What would be the minimum hardware requirements for that setup to work > > pretty good -- ie. processor and speed, RAM, hard disk? > > > > Any thoughts or suggestions on the subject would be appreciated, > > including recommendations of good sources for a used machine. > > > > Thanks, > > Matt > > > > > > > -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
