[Coco] Keeping current... ????

[Joel Ewy]

Dan Olson wrote:
>> 4400.  And they did a fine job with Mozilla 1.0 and OpenOffice.org 1.0.
>> Now I've got an Athlon 3000XP+ that I'm dedicating to flight sim games,
>> an Athlon 1800XP+ that I'm using for other Windows 2K stuff, and I've
>> moved the K6/2-450 to the main Linux workstation, to replace the older
>> 200MHz motherboard that had been running RH8 fairly capably.  I want
>> that computer to do word processing, web browsing, email, occasional
>> light GIMP work, and some fiddling in Perl and C.  It should easily be
>> up to that task, at least to my standards.  There's no reason why a
>> computer like that, which hasn't yet begun to rust or break down, should
>> be incapable of doing those things -- even with a GUI.  I'd like to move
>
> That's what burns me the most!  I have used 486 and Pentium machines
> in the past with a web browser and mail reader, running Linux, and I
> don't see why a newer machine, say a PII with 128M of ram, shouldn't
> be overkill for looking at web pages or reading e-mail.  I probably
> should try DSL (Damn Small Linux) in the near future, it's probably my
> best bet.  I've even got a 386 that I used as an Xterminal for the
> longest time, it was a little slow loading up but ran great once it
> got going.  I feal like my choices anymore are all or nothing; either
> I need a huge hard drive, lots or RAM, and the latest Linux, or I need
> something that's old and lacks programs (such as Firefox) just to get
> it running on my hardware.
>
Definitely try DSL.  But I've found Xubuntu works nicely on PII-class
systems, if they have sufficient RAM.  My wife has been using Xubuntu
6.06 on a PII-450 with 256M.  128 would probably work fine as well if
you don't overload it with too many programs running at once.  I've used
it on an iMac G3 266 with 64M.  RAM felt a little tight on that system. 
The current standard installer is a live CD system.  This has trouble
installing in less than 256M.  But there is an alternate install CD that
should still work well for low-end systems.  I think you could also use
Xubuntu on high-end Pentium (I)-ish systems providing they have
sufficient RAM and hard disk space.  Otherwise, you just can't beat DSL
for performance per megabyte.  Also, I've learned that with DSL, if you
are installing to a hard drive, you really, really should do the Frugal
Install, not the Debian-esque hard drive install.  It makes upgrades
much easier and fits better with the way DSL was intended to be used. 
It's a little different, but makes a lot of sense for making efficient
use of computing resources.

JCE
>     Dan
>
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