Low end computer

Alcap · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 25

Hi,
I have an old laptop, a pentium II with 96MB of RAM and I was thinking about putting it to use with linux.
I would only use it to listen to music, browse the web, IM and watching a few videos.
I was thinking about installing debian, because gentoo would take a very long time to compile on such an old system, with xfce. I've never used xfce, I know it's very light, so I was wondering if it would run smoothly. Another thing are applications. Which ones are the best, as well as lightweight, to browse the web(I believe it's firefox), listen to music, watch films and IM.
Thanks

poly_poly-man · Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 5:02 am Post subject: Re: Low end computer

s0ulslack · Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 6:47 am Post subject:

Xfce is a Desktop Environment, not just a Window Manager. It should provide a fairly complete suite of apps that'll take care of almost everything you want/need.

Videos/Music: Xfmedia, part of the Xfce Project. Uses libxine and works pretty well here from experience here.

IM: pidgin is about the only "full featured" multi-protocol client that works well

Since Xfce is gtk+ based you might try a lightweight browser such as epiphany or galeon (not sure if both are maintained/developed anymore)

The ram shouldn't be too big a problem with just Xfce/Xfce apps, but once you get outside that realm (especially if you use Firefox) you'll want atleast 256mb+

Have Fun

Alcap · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 25

I can't buy more ram because it's a laptop. It's an ASUS F7400 and it's currently running windows 98 SE.
I thought about not having a desktop environment, just X+evilWM, or any other window manager you might sugest, but if I install a program like pidgin it will install the gtk libraries, and it would be pretty much the same as having xfce, am I right?
Another thing is that, I've never seen a computer with just 96MB of ram. Usually this is not the exact amount, I've seen windows (and linux) giving me wrong ram numbers. For example, on this computer I have 1024MB of ram. When the computer boots, it says 1024 on the bios checksum, windows recognizes 1024MB, but linux only recognizes 826MB. I'm really hoping that this is such a case, and I have in fact 128MB. Is there any way to check?
By the way, why not debian? I mean, without gnome it's as good as any other distro, am I right? I've never used slackware, and I know that it doesn't have a package manager, and that gives me creeps :lol:

Thanks for the help :wink:

termite · Guru Joined: 06 May 2007 Posts: 466

96 is actually a reasonable number: one 32mb stick and one 64mb stick.

You should be able to get some more ram for it on craigslist or ebay. Google the model and see if you can find what weird old ram it takes...

poly_poly-man · Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 4:11 pm Post subject:

Alcap · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 25

6GB. It's big enough, I believe.

poly_poly-man · Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 5:17 pm Post subject:

Whatever you do, give yourself (somewhat) generous swap. Remebr that memory is SIGNIFICANTLY faster than swap, bu still, it is VERY useful.

poly-p man
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mbreith · Apprentice Joined: 09 Mar 2006 Posts: 196

I am currently running FVWM and Firefox and I am using about 210MB of ram doing it. The largest drain on the ram is firefox, which is using over 10% of the total.

As for installing things that use gtk+ or qt libraries, it is not the same as actually running the desktop. If a program needs one of the libraries, it will load just the libraries that it needs and maybe some supporting programs. I am not entirely sure on the details. Running the actual desktop loads many more libraries than just a single application would.
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bendy · Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 8:29 pm Post subject:

Alcap · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 25

I would gladly install gentoo, but it will take ages to compile.
I was trying to avoid upgrading, but I really don't see much choice.
Should I install the newest version of the distro(I'm still trying to decide which one is the best), or should I look for an old version?

poly_poly-man · Posted: Sat Aug 25, 2007 11:19 pm Post subject:

linuxpyro · Apprentice Joined: 08 Sep 2004 Posts: 255

bertaboy · l33t Joined: 05 Nov 2004 Posts: 604

As long as we're bashing firefox and all, I feel that I'm obligated to tell you about the alternatives for firefox.

SwiftFox is a stripped-down version of Firefox. Basically, it's what firefox used to stand for, but is built off of the latest firefox builds.

Opera is very reputable, especially on machines that have less resources. I use it as my primary browser, but there are the occasional sites that I have to visit that require that I use either something like that uses either the Gecko engine (e.g. firefox & netscape) or the Trident engine (e.g. Internet Explorer)

synapscape

Hi!

I also have some old notebook with Gentoo installed. It's an old Toshiba Tecra8100 (P-II, 366MHz, 192MB RAM (of 256max), 30G HDD). Gentoo runs great on this device.

I'm using XFCE4 as a desktop environment. All XFCE apps are starting very fast, and i don't even have superspecial CFLAGS (-O2 -pipe -fomitframepointer) or have done some other tricks. I really recommend XFCE as an desktop-env for this laptop!

Starting Firefox is a bit slower on this notebook, but it's usable when it's running. But don't try pages with many animations/flash on it, they will eat all your cpu-power. Maybe try Opera?
Music playback is done mostly with Audacious, but i gave mpd and some clients a try. Might be a good alternative for you music playing needs? Yes, MPD and its client are running on this laptop.
I also have VLC installed, i wanted to see how it would work out. It works, but the CPU limits the experience, as it too often cannot play the movie smoothly (DIVX AVI, a VCD should work better).
Curious as i am, i also tried some emulations and found out that some NES emulations were not so bad on the machine.

I can only support the suggestions to buy more RAM! It was funny to see that you never saw a system with 96MB before ;o) It will work with 96MB, but don't try heavy web surfing! Music Playback should be pretty ok with it. Hey, i also have an old p1-233 lappy with whoping 72MB RAM and it played music very well (audacious and XFCE)

)
But your exeperience of using the laptop really gets better with more ram! Just buy 128MB to have 192MB in total. For me it is enough to surf around while listening to music.

Compiling is of cource possible on this machine, but of course it is slooow

) Compiling Firefox for example takes several hours...
I did the install using a newer machine (AthlonXP 2.

. Basically i followed the install instructions, but i did a chroot into a directory on the bigger machine and installed the whole system into that dir. After all SW was compiled and installed, i made a tarball out of it and transferred it to the laptop. I think i got some bootdisk from somewhere (maybe some rescue disk?) and booted it. The tarball was burned to a CD. I prepared the disk of the laptop and extracted the tarball. Some additional touches and there you go: Gentoo installed on an old notebook. Maybe you could check the alternative install guides for some ideas how to better install gentoo on this laptop.
You could also just take out the disk and but it to a bigger desktop machine and install it there

)

In general, your old notebook is pretty well suited for some browsing, small office and music playback tasks.

have fun!

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John R. Graham · Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 5:08 pm Post subject:

I concur: Gentoo should be just fine. The nice thing about Gentoo is that the base install is sooo lean. My smallest system is a 90 MHz Pentium I, initially with 96MiB of RAM and a single 5.5GiB hard drive. This system is still in service as my home router, although it now has 128MiB of RAM and a slightly larger hard drive. I also have distcc installed now but initially did all the compiles locally. As I recall, glibc took about 2 days to compile.

- John

Cyker · Veteran Joined: 15 Jun 2006 Posts: 1746

Binary distros like Slackware are a lot quicker to get running than Gentoo by far. Slackware in particular is nice because it uses much simpler config layout (More BSD-style than SystemV or Gentoo-style), and the tgz package system is so basic that you can easily compile (./configure && make && DESTDIR=~/test/ make install) your own packages with a lot less hoop-jumping than you'd need in Gentoo.

Of course it has no dependency checking and you can only upgrade the 'edges', and not stuff like GCC or X. Because it would be painful.

Gentoo would seem like a good distro at first, but the compiling would kill you - The first incarnation of this server I used with Gentoo was, I think, an AMD K6-3 400 - Thank smeg it was a server because I literally had to leave it running for DAYS after installing 2005.0 and trying to upgrade (The fact that I had a 256kb DSL connection didn't help).

If you could somehow get around that, it wouldn't be so bad.

I think Slackware is still optimized for i386 for maximum compatibility, and while x86 CPUs have been very good at optimizing i386 code on account of Windows being compiled for it, there will be a slight performance loss. Nothing major 'tho.

I actually used KDE on the K6-3, so it can be done, but you need to treat it a bit careful and not open loads of stuff at once or turn on all the flashy stuff.

Current versions of KDE are a lot bulkier, as is X, so I'm not sure how far your lappy can go there.
XFCE is a good choice, but if you're a classic Unixen you could forgo that sort of thing altogether and just use a lone Window Manager (Like we did in the old days young whipper snapper!

).

Nice ones I've tried include FVWM, AfterStep, Blackbox, IceWM, AmiWM and Window Maker.

John R. Graham · Posted: Thu Aug 30, 2007 7:48 pm Post subject:

Alcap · n00b Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 25

Hey,
I've been browsing around some forums, I found a tuturial that uses ubuntu 5.10, X+XDM+iceWM for pc's with ram from 32 to 128MB. I don't know if it will work for me, but it seems reasonable. The only thing I would defenitly change is the distro, I would used debian. My experiences with ubuntu have not been the best. Too much instability.
Another thing that I thought about is damn small linux. I was afraid to bring it up because the only thing I know is that is debian based. Can anyone give me info about this distro? Especially if you've used it in a low end computer.
PS:

blkdragon · n00b Joined: 20 Nov 2006 Posts: 50

I too have an old laptop that I am using to post this.

1. Get more ram. 192Mb minimum.

2. Up your HDD. With 6Gb, you will not be able to compile VLC's wxGTK/wxWindows packages, and your HD will die as a result. I speak from experience.

Its a PII 366 Mhz, with a 30Gb drive and 192Mb ram.

Yes, back in the day i used this beast to compile Gnome-2.14, and that took, what, 72hrs+? It was madness, and at that time i only had 128Mb ram. Plus, that doesn't include distfiles downloading time as i already had the distfiles from a friend.

The better option i find for compiling (instead of using distcc, which is a pain to setup and get going) is plugging up your lappy HD into an external hd, and hooking up to faster computer. I have used to emerge world, and it did so in around 4 hours. Much better than 72 hours!

Yes, i too tried the binary distro method. It was Ubuntu 6.06, and it ran SLOOOOW. I got so fed up with it, i said "what else can be faster?" and my friend recommended Gentoo to me.

KDE (from ArchLinux) works, but is SLOW.

XFCE is lightweight, but i found that it wasn't as easily customisable as Gnome, and had less of an "appeal" to it then Gnome.

Fluxbox would be recommended, as it is extremely lightweight, but is again, uncustomisable and lacks "appeal".

As for music playing, why not use the command line? Its lean and fast, plus you dont have to compile many extra apps to get it working! The program i'm thinking about is MPG123, and it works like a dream.

Use Os instead of O2. Will compile smaller binaries, which equals less disk space and snappier performance.

Currently running Pidgin-2.1.0, Firefox-2.0.0.6 (four tabs), MPG123 playing in background, and I'm experiencing no lag whatsoever...

And another handy tip: once you get a workable environment with all your apps etc installed, make a full complete tarball of your system, as this will reduce stress levels later on when something goes wrong and you want to reinstall.

For office apps, use Abiword, or openoffice-bin. You will like these so much more than openoffice from source! Preformace does take a hit, but you dont have to wait a day or two just so you can type a letter, hey? And you need 8+GB of disk space to even emerge openoffice from source anyways!

Gentoo is great for legacy machines, just make sure you only upgrade when there's a more powerful machine nearby (distcc) or when you have your external enclosure ready....

Cheers and Have Fun!

[quote=synapscape]I did the install using a newer machine (AthlonXP 2.

. Basically i followed the install instructions, but i did a chroot into a directory on the bigger machine and installed the whole system into that dir. After all SW was compiled and installed, i made a tarball out of it and transferred it to the laptop. I think i got some bootdisk from somewhere (maybe some rescue disk?) and booted it. The tarball was burned to a CD. I prepared the disk of the laptop and extracted the tarball. Some additional touches and there you go: Gentoo installed on an old notebook. Maybe you could check the alternative install guides for some ideas how to better install gentoo on this laptop.
You could also just take out the disk and but it to a bigger desktop machine and install it there

) [/quote]

yes, i agree with this totally. Good on you, synapscape!

Any other questions, dont hesistate to ask!
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Toshiba Portege 7020CT
PII, 366Mhz, 192Mb RAM, 30GB HDD, XP & Gentoo

Hewlett Packard 8833
PIII, 1Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 80+40Gb HDD, XP & Gentoo

Non-Branded Computer
P4, 1.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 160Gb HDD, XP & Gentoo

bertaboy · l33t Joined: 05 Nov 2004 Posts: 604

zkosty · Posted: Thu Sep 13, 2007 7:01 pm Post subject: Inspiron 5000e

I have just recently installed Gentoo on Inspiron 5000e laptop with approx 300 MB RAM and Pentium III. It was not so bad but some compiles still took half a day (e.g., GCC or Firefox). I also have a faster desktop so I tried DistCC but it did not seem to speed up anything almost at all, besides, emerging things like GCC won't use DistCC anyway.
I never considered another distro simply because I have Gentoo on the Desktop and that simplifies things for me.
1. So reading this forum, I got cheered up with the idea of using NFS or hard disk enclosure to mount the laptop hard disk on a higher end machine, chrooting, and compiling there. Can you somebody post a small how-to about this? Eg, compatibility of USE flags, architecture, GCC versions, is any of these an issue? Except for CHROOTing, do you need to issue any other commands before you start emerging?
2. I installed it on a 2 GB partition (this excludes /home /boot and swap), and to my surprise, after I installed the basic stuff I like to have (Fluxbox, Firefox being the major big applications) I found out I used up some 90% of this space even after deleting all the distfiles. So I moved /usr/portage on the Desktop and use it over NFS, but I still only have less than 500 MB space. I would love to install OpenOffice also but there isn't enough space. Now I am reading on this forum how lean a gentoo BASE installation can be - what have I done wrong?
3. It is true, I fear the day this laptop harddisk fails and I will have to start everything over again. How exactly would you go about tarballing the whole installation? Can be done over NFS ? Do I have have to mount the partitions separately (root, /boot, and /home)? What will be the exact tar command to preserve all the links, permissions, etc. ?
thanks
zkosty

i92guboj · Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 10:40 pm Post subject:

poly_poly-man · Posted: Wed Sep 19, 2007 11:02 pm Post subject:

ahurst · Posted: Thu Sep 20, 2007 10:51 am Post subject: