P2 300 Notebook...

volospin · Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2003 3:10 am Post subject: P2 300 Notebook...

Greetings,

I just want to know that,
would it be too slow to run Xwindows on a P2 300 notebook.

I really don't mind to use a lot of time (maybe a week)
to install Gentoo from Stage 1.

The specification...

P2 300
128MB
6GB Harddisk

Regards,
_________________
PIII-S 1.4G / 512MB / TUSL2-M / 3C920 x 2 / Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB

mlynx · n00b Joined: 07 Feb 2003 Posts: 27

That's almost exactly the spec of my notebook; from which I am writing this reply. I run GNOME, twm and icewm, but I wouldn't hesitate to say fluxbox should work well. Add to that the overhead of running the entire thing on an encrypted root filesystem with encrypted swap and you'd think that it would be a real dog. I am very happy however. The only time that I really notice that it bogs a bit is when I am running multiple 'emerge's' in the background.

Typical usage is Evolution, OO, vi (multiple terms simultaneously), ghostscript and Phoenix/Galeon as the browsers.

Initially I ran the machine with only 64 MB of RAM, but OO swapped and thrashed pretty hard. An upgrade to 196 MB has made all the difference (best $ spent).

When building I run with

volospin · Posted: Thu Jul 03, 2003 5:37 am Post subject:

Thanks, your experience is much appreciated.

Honestly, I haven't start my Xwindow life...
Since the notebook I got is Sharp A250,
I am planning to run both Windows 2000 :oops:

(I expect it to be slow)
and Gentoo Linux (which is good for at least command prompt)

I will mess with my Sharp notebook as soon as possible and
contribute my experience.
_________________
PIII-S 1.4G / 512MB / TUSL2-M / 3C920 x 2 / Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB

clumsyninja · n00b Joined: 27 Jun 2003 Posts: 61 Location: North Texas

i run fluxbox and windowmaker on a pentium 100mhz w/ 64mb dimm ram. yes it creaks along slowly, but it is faster then the windows 95 it replaced

_________________
katana root # cat /proc/sys/kernel/osrelease
2.4.20-gentoo-r7

xentric · Guru Joined: 16 Mar 2003 Posts: 410 Location: Netherlands

Well, it wouldn't be really fast with the heavy desktop environments... but I run KDE 3.1
on an old Pentium 233Mhz with 96Mb RAM and it works at an acceptable speed! So you
shouldn't worry about the speed. And if you try out a new 2.5.x kernel you really notice
a speed improvement in system response. If you think it's to slow, you can always try
out some of the small footprint window managers like Enlightenment, Fluxbox, Blackbox
or ICEwm.
And if you can put some more RAM in your system, that would improve things more than
upgrading to a faster CPU. In my opinion, Linux doesn't care much about Mhz but it
likes Mb's

Give it a shot !

volospin · Posted: Fri Jul 04, 2003 3:49 am Post subject:

Well,

I won't upgrade and can't upgrade the notebook anymore.
It's reach it's physical limits.

I also agree that CPU doesn't make a difference
(except when compiling) than RAM does.

Linux would be happen to have 512MB RAM.

I am running mainly Samba on a Celeron 400 with 128MB RAM
that's supporting around 30 people... Gentoo of course.
_________________
PIII-S 1.4G / 512MB / TUSL2-M / 3C920 x 2 / Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB