[Juergen]

Every once in a while I will d/l a Linux distro and install it on a spare pc just for the heck of it. I might spend some time getting peripherals to work. I poke around a bit and quickly lose interest. I recently tried Mandriva Linux 2006. I have tried several Mandrake versions in the past so I figure it would be a good candidate. I installed it on an old P4, 1.4Ghz machine w/ 128M ram. Not exactly super fast but it should have no trouble. It seems to be working fine except everything is real slow. I start firefox and it takes maybe 5 seconds to even start to load. In general there seems to be a pause for everything that is quite noticable. I'm not going to worry about it too much, I was just wondering if anyone here has had the same experience with this distro.

 

[AdamWill]

128MB is _really_ low for any modern Linux distro, but one thing which will probably help immediately is removing Kat - it's a desktop search app (like Spotlight on OS X, or the Google desktop search on Windows) which we included by default in 2006 but really probably wasn't mature enough to be in there. Either do "urpme kat" as root at a console, or use the graphical software removal app. You're still likely to struggle running KDE or GNOME in 128MB, though, they eat RAM just like XP or OS X. You might be better off with a lighter desktop like Xfce, or IceWM, and some lighter apps (Firefox will happily eat 100MB on its own sometimes). Or a memory upgrade

 

[ricardo diaz]

Install Slackware on my PC for me. I can't even figure it out.

 

[Juergen]

Quote:

Originally Posted by AdamWill 128MB is _really_ low for any modern Linux distro, but one thing which will probably help immediately is removing Kat - it's a desktop search app (like Spotlight on OS X, or the Google desktop search on Windows) which we included by default in 2006 but really probably wasn't mature enough to be in there. Either do "urpme kat" as root at a console, or use the graphical software removal app. You're still likely to struggle running KDE or GNOME in 128MB, though, they eat RAM just like XP or OS X. You might be better off with a lighter desktop like Xfce, or IceWM, and some lighter apps (Firefox will happily eat 100MB on its own sometimes). Or a memory upgrade

Makes sense. I'll just have to find some more ram. Thanks for the tips.

p.s. Keep up the good work. I really love XP but as my number of computers keeps growing so does my OS budget. We are finally seeing viable and affordable alternatives