[GLLUG] new guy to Linux, need a few reccomendations

[Richard Houser]

IceWM is a light-weight window manager as-is (my personal preference
for P3 class machine on a ram diet).  Once you get your gui trimmed
down to that point, you should turn off all extraneous services to
save ram.  Linux can do usability wonders with 32MB of server daemons,
but you want to avoid much of that if you are capped at 192MB.

You may also want to swap from Xorg X11 to a lighter-weight
alternative.  Also, don't even consider trying OpenOffice without a
RAM bump.  Chick may have some recommendations for lighter-weight
replacement for some of this, as he tends to run some P2/P3 era
laptops.  You may just be better off upgrading the ram.  There's a
good chance you have a friend somewhere with 256MB of unused P3 era
RAM.

If you are going to use this much, my personal recommendation is to
invest in a newer machine.  Over the course of a few years, you could
easily pay for the cost of a new machine in electricity alone,
assuming you spec it out appropriately.  My current (big) server
started out as a $200 black Friday build a year ago (4GB ram, AMD X2
4000 65 watt, Antec 85%+ efficiency PS), and you can certainly shop
used components in trusted circles, too.  After adding a couple cards
and a hard disk, that machine pulls about 605-70 watts from the wall,
as opposed to near 250watts from my previous one.  That's well over
100Kwh difference a month if you leave it on, and the new hardware is
capable of running multiple operating systems concurrently under KVM
(replacing more machines).

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 7:00 PM, Karl Schuttler <rexykik at gmail.com> wrote:
> Any of the box's would be a good choice for a gui on an older machine
> (Fluxbox, Blackbox, Whitebox in particular), but you're talking about window
> managers (WM) and not about distros here. You could just install fluxbox on
> top of your base ubuntu/IceWM install (apt-get install fluxbox) and try that
> out, see if it's any faster.
>
> On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:54 PM, Bert W. Carrier Jr. <bertcarrier at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hello folks,
>>
>>
>> I am new to the group, and I have been using Ubuntu 9.10 for a few
>> months now on my main box. I like it quite well, and I rarely boot to XP
>> at all anymore. I tried Kubuntu, and did'nt care for it as it was slow
>> and crashed often.   I also am running Xubuntu on one of my P4 laptops,
>> and it seems ok.
>>
>> My question is:   I have a P3, 500mhz dinosaur laptop with 192mb RAM,
>> and I want to run linux on it for word processing, email, and web
>> surfing.   I tried Xubuntu with no success, it's far too slow.  I
>> installed the base Ubuntu system from the alternate install CD, and
>> installed IceWM, but I didn't care for that.   I don't think I am ready
>> to build my own version of a GUI.  What is a good, prepackaged distro
>> for a slow old beater?
>>
>> How about Fluxbox, has anyone tried it?    Sorry if I come off like a
>> total noob,  but I guess if the shoe fits, right?
>>
>> Bert
>>
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>
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