Re: [Sheflug] recommended 'distro' for K6 166

[Seb James <seb [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 11:09, Chris Johnson wrote:
> I've got a stand alone PC that I need to be able to do normal office/student
> study type things on.  Its a AMD k6- 166 with 82MB RAM and a 3GB hard disk.
> It will need to run OpenOffice.org, web browsing, email and printing and be
> easy for a windows user to migrate to (its for my sister at University and
> her current OS is a bit of a drain on the PC and it keeps suffering from
> virus infections too.)
> I have a feeling KDE or GNOME will stretch it too much.  Does anyone have
> any recommendations as to an alternative to these that is lightweight (in
> requirements) but still quite feature rich and window$ like?  And to a
> lightweight distribution that I can use this with?
> 

Chris, I have done an install of Gentoo Linux on a PII 266 with 96 MB of
RAM. It took a looong time to compile everything, but resulted in a very
usable machine. I used icewm rather than kde, but installed gnome
applications such as abiword which ran very well indeed. OpenOffice also
worked well.

I've just done another installation on a K5 100MHz machine with 32MB of
RAM. I'm not going to ask this one to run Openoffice due to the RAM, but
it runs X just fine. It took a looooooong time to compile Gentoo - in
particular glibc took over 48 hours, cos it was running programs that
were larger than the amount of ram available. The hdd had steam coming
out of it!

Why use Gentoo and compile? To get maximum optimization of all your
apps, using compiler flags such as "-march=i686 -mmmx -m3dnow" and so on
and so forth. It does make a difference, especially on slower machines.
The Gentoo website has an excellent installation guide and it's not too
hard, even if "compile" has a scary ring to it! With Gentoo, it's guided
compilation.

regards,

Seb
-- 
Managing Director,   Educational Systems,  Hypercube Systems Ltd
         Providing Open Source ICT solutions for schools.
Tel: 0845 458 0277                Web: www.hypercubesystems.co.uk
Mob: 07900 958964               Email: seb [at] hypercubesystems.co.uk

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