[nylug-talk] Distro Recommendation... for an old, cruddy machine.

[Sunny Dubey]

On Sunday 06 January 2008 04:13:24 pm oscar zero wrote:
> What Distro would you savvy Linux Shills drop on a sub-1-GHz, 256MB, 120gig
> HD?

Any

At the end of the day it boils down to a few things:

A) Turning off memory sucking Xorg/desktop features (In the case of KDE/QT 
leaving on DRI will actually speed things up.)

B) Taking the time to explore alternative apps that do what you want without 
the huge memory suck.  IE:  Opera instead of firefox, Audacious instead of 
Amarok, anything instead of Evolution, heh

(In the case of the above, if you run a desktop like KDE or GNOME, you may as 
well opt to using their apps because many of the libraries they are going to 
use are the same ones every other KDE or GNOME flavored app will use.)

C) Recompile the latest stable kernel with all the features stock kernel devs 
often don't enable like NO_HZ, HIGH_RES_TIMERS, PREEMPT, PREEMPT_BLK whatever 
else there is (I haven't look in a while).

If you value your aggravation, do get an additional 256MB .. that alone will 
make the biggest difference.  It can't be more than 20-30 quid.

Also the precompiled version of OpenOffice from OpenOffice.org is much 
snappier than what most distros ship because it is compiled with Sun's Java.

-- 
Sunny Dubey

  mail:  sunny at audiowiki.org
  tele:  212.333.3542