Linux on Pentium era systems

Warren Luebkeman warren at resara.com
Fri Aug 17 10:07:55 EDT 2007


I got Xubuntu installed (took a LONG time), and it worked!  A little on the 
heavy side though, at least for this laptop.  I had to stop gdm from 
launching because it brought the laptop to its knees, but I installed the 
blackbox window manager (which i believe is what DSL uses) and that worked 
pretty well.  

Firefox was not happy, and is pretty much unusable.  Gaim works great though, 
and Dillo (really low resource Internet Browser) worked for some basic 
websites, but is otherwise pretty much useless.  

The good news is I got my wireless card working, which allowed me to rdesktop 
into my desktop computer.  This works great! 

I'll look at SLAX.  DSL was able to run in about 20 MBs of RAM, whereas 
Xubuntu is using up all my memory and helping itself to swap.  

The most compelling thing about this little project is that the laptops 
battery appears to still be good.  I ran it for a little over an hour last 
night and the battery LED was still green (which means good).  I'm going to 
run it today to see how long it will go.  Considering its an 11 year old 
laptop, it seems a little bizarre that the battery could still be good.  So 
either they truly dont' make them like they use to, or someone replaced the 
battery recently (although I can't imagine IBM would still sell that battery, 
but maybe). 


On Thursday 16 August 2007 11:43 pm, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On Aug 16, 2007, at 09:39, Warren Luebkeman wrote:
> > So, I need to find
> > a lightweight Linux distro with a modern Kernel.
>
> If Xubuntu doesn't work out or is too heavy, you might look at SLAX.
> The v6 release candidate is pretty good, though the lack of a package
> manager is driving me moderately nuts.
>
> Mixing new and old hardware and kernels can also be frustrating.  I
> have a Compaq server here I just took out of mothballs and it's
> running RedHat 6.2 just fine, but apparently the 2.6 kernel doesn't
> support its memory controller at all.  Maybe DSL would do it - thanks
> for the reminder :)
>
> -Bill
>
> -----
> Bill McGonigle, Owner           Work: 603.448.4440
> BFC Computing, LLC              Home: 603.448.1668
> bill at bfccomputing.com           Cell: 603.252.2606
> http://www.bfccomputing.com/    Page: 603.442.1833
> Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/
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-- 
Warren Luebkeman
Founder, COO
Resara LLC
1.888.357.9195
www.resara.com


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