Best setup for (almost) prehistoric Linux box?

[lardman]

The only Linux box I have connected to the 'net (at a decent speed - T1 at work) is rather old. Unfortunately as it's the only one on the 'net and I want to be able to do a variety of things with it (like develop with OE! which does sort of need a 'net connection).

Anyway it the GUI is stupidly slow (which is the most painful bit of using a system). It's a PII-400, 64MB RAM, 40GB disk space and using Mandrake 9.2 and KDE at the mo.

Firstly, what can I do to make it go a bit quicker? I know KDE is bad news, what would people recommend instead by way of WM and filebrowser? I have the default services plus ssh turned on, I've looked through them and it seems to be a pretty minimum sort of setup so I don't think there's much to be gained here.

Mozilla seems to be very very very very very slow, is there anything equally good (or nearly there) and free to replace it? Equally, trying to start an xterm takes ages (usually when there's something else going on in the background). Not good.

If Mandrake just won't work, then which distro would people recommend I move to?

Cheers,


Si

[boosalis]

Perhaps if you use motif as your window manager you will free up a lot of resources, to make your browser run faster.  Motif is pretty easy to customize, as there is basically just one resource file (menus) and one attribute file (colors and fonts) file.  just look for a file like system.mwmrc and copy it to your home directory calling it .mwmrc.  Just by looking at the file you will figure out how to customise it.  Then for colors I think the file is something like MWM, probable in your /usr/X11R6/app-defaults file, again copy it to your home directoy as something like .MWM.

[bredroll]

that machine doesnt sound all that prehistoric to me,

firstly. kde is a memory beast, chuck it,

although mandrake is compiled for i586 rather than the standard 386 of most distros i never notice much difference unless im doing something like large selects in mysql etc.

if i were you, throw away mandrake and install debian 3.0 (woody), but you dont have to do that.

for your desktop, stick to gnome 1.4 (this flys along on my 400mhz laptop) and only install system services that you absolutly need (ssh, stmp etc..) for your browser look at galeon, it is alot faster to start than mozilla but still uses Gecko

also, my 400mhz laptop runs the gnome anjuta c/c++ IDE very nicely,

have fun

Ian

p.s.

boosalis, motif isnt a window manager, its a graphic toolkit like GTK, QT etc, it is also pretty old and fairly crap looking :-) (think netscape 4 era)

[eonblueapocalypse]

I wouldn't forget the *BSD. In fact NetBSD is really fast and is less specialized than Free* or Open* .I have been using FreeBSD for a long time now. Installing those huge distros like Mandrake or SUsE just fills your disk with enormous scripts that make you lose the biggest point. Knowing what's going on any time because everything is simple and clear.
If you have to use X (do not underestimate the power of pure console. it is really funny to have a beast like KDE on 17" and smaller monitors with all those fancy huge icons as if i am a crippled sitting in a wheel chair and pushing those shortcuts with my whole hand) i like Fluxbox for its simplicity or you could choose the WM that is written in your "native" programming language so that you will be able to hack it. Moreover my Zaurus made me appreciate Dillo as a browser a lot.

[nevarrie]

I would uses srceen, vim, links -g, and Midnight Commander.

This is my curent setup on my imac, 300mh with 64mb ram, at work running Gentoo PPC 1.4.  I do not uses mc that much but I do not find the need for a file manager that much.  

links -g is a graphic version of links(a console webbrowser) that runs in a framebuffer.  I have found for average websurfing it works nice though it has problems with jave though it works great on frames.

Though if you really want to uses X I would recommend looking at ratpoison or ion for that box since they have a really small foot print.

I will admit that my iMac is not my primary workstation it is just an extra console on my desk, I uses a 1500 amd Desknote running gentoo for most things and a 400mh W2K workstation for the few things I need to do in windows(VSS, Sharepoint)

The one last option I would recommend is to keep the linux box at console and uses putty from a windows machine to connect in to do what ever you are wanting to work on for oe.  With screen you will be able to start something disconnect that screen scession and then reconnect to tha screen session form somewhere else at a latte time and find it still running and have a scroll back to look at what happoned while you where not connected to that screen session.(I do this every day so I cna keep things running like oemake and still work on them from anywhere I have ssh access from)

Those are just some of the ideas I have and uses on a daily basis, I like the headless with screen best since I cna work from my z also.

[lardman]

Thank you all for the suggestions, I'll start trying them out.


Si

[Stubear]

For a small lite window manager try one of the *box family (openbox, blackbox, fluxbox) they have a small foot print and run must faster on low end machines than kde or gnome.

Firefox will be better than Mozilla, but you could try dillo - it's a smaller but not all IE designed pages will load (actually some won't load with firefox either)

For a filemanager - if you really want gui based rather than somethuing like midnight commander, then try gentoo - not the distro - the filemanager (http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/). Otherwise fdclone or midnight commander should do the trick.

Stu

[amrein]

Try Mandrake 10.0 with iceWM, openbox, blackbox, fluxbox but not KDE nor Gnome.
Mandrake 10.0 is faster than 9.1 and 9.2 because of new improved libraries, new gcc/glibc, new gnu thread library...

What you need is to increase your RAM (upgrade to at least 128 or better 256 or more if you can). The easier way is to take the RAM on another PC that doesn't need it.

I like what someone said on mdk newgroups:

"Every year, I find Linux more and more faster and powerful. If they continue to improve it like this, I will have to downgrade my hardware."

[bluedevils]

Another vote for a *box type wm.  I love fluxbox.  It is clean, fast and great to customize.

I would think that the pdaxrom would be a good reference for what runs on a resource limited device.

I'm not diverse enough to know what distro is best for you.  I have gentoo on a p3 700mhz laptop and it is easy to recompile the kernel to suit your needs.  I can also add software optimized to my settings very easily.  Slackware is fast for me, but I don't think it would be optimized for a p2.

[Pyrates]

IT's all about choice, isn't it  Let me add: I like fvwm best, it's really fast, and if you take the time to configure it, there's nothing you can't do...

You might want to look at galeon, it's still a full-featured browser (built upon mozilla), but I think it's faster than mozilla. Or try opera... but all that doesn't do to much, just get rid of KDE on that box  I also vote for gentoo as a filemanager. Dillo is nice as long as your browsing is restricted to sites that work for it (doesn't have proper CSS support).

One more thing, once you got hold of the windowmanager-of-your-choice, get rid of freetype. You don't need those Truetype fonts anyway, and that's a HUGE load of work you box has to do for that. I don't know if you have to compile X yourself for that (outch), but that'll help a lot as well. If you have to, you probably want to try gentoo as a distribution, it's very easy to get X without freetype on that (not that it wouldn't compile a long time on your box...).

Cheers
Philipp

[amrein]

You could even use machbox (used on pdaXrom) and its windows manager control center and desktop. It's a little buggy in Debian Unstable and in Mdk Cooker but it works.

[spaul]

I use slackware on old dell latitudes .  Conventional wisdom and my subjective impression is that it is much faster on older equipment than mandrake 10 or suse. No hard data however.